Monday, June 30, 2008

Top FriendFeed Users (by number of pages on Google)

This list is a work-in-progress & not complete. It's a combination of the 30 people in the recent article Top 30 FriendFeed Users Based on Google Ranking [Lifestream Blog - 6/27/08] (FriendFeed comments) and some people I know are heavy users.

The original form of this article was a FriendFeed post (or micro-blog) (12 likes, 12+ comments) which is no longer appearing in my feed (probably due to too much editing of comments).

I was posting a few technical notes in my business blog, but stopped when I felt that was not appropriate, and I decided to start this "Technical Notes" blog for my ramblings.

Some discussions of the Lifstream article at FriendFeed using a "who:everyone&num =100" search - Louis Gray (29 likes, 36 comments) - Scott Beale (11 likes, 6 comments)

Mark Krynsky's comment at Disqus "...after paging through Google's results I thought it would be fun to put this together because (a) it contained many people that are great FriendFeed users yet not at the top of the digerati & (b) I was surprised to find myself appear in it. The measuring stick for popularity on Twitter is Twitterholic which is based on number of followers. FriendFeed has consciously decided not to expose this number for users of its service..."

Alexander Ebel extended this analysis to the German-speaking FriendFeed users. Alexander writes "I just restricted the Google search to language=german. So people listed can be from Germany, Austria, Switzerland... Friendfeed users who come from one of these countries but write in english couldn't make it on the list."

I felt that better analysis might be searching people's names on Google with "site:friendfeed.com" to see how many entries appear.

The Lifestream list appears somewhat random using this method (1) Robert Scoble 66,600 (2) Louis Gray 20,000 ... (5) Chris Baskind 3,290 (6) Mr. News Junk 885 (7) MG Siegler 5,190 (8) Frederic 4,010 (9) Muhammad Saleem 2,320 (10) Scott Beale 29,100.

How does "Mr. News Junk" with 885 pages become #6?

Here's my hand-crafted list:

(1) Robert Scoble 66,600
(2) Michael Arrington 47,500
(3) Paul Buchheit 29,100
(3) Scott Beale 29,100
(5) Loic Le Muir 28,200
(6) Jason Calacanis 28,100
(7) Leo Laporte 27,600
(8) Steve Rubel 26,700
(9) mashable 25,600
(10) Fred Wilson 25,300
(11) Louis Gray 20,000
(12) Thomas Hawk 18,000
(13) edythe (Polly Roberts) 17,500
(14) Susan Beebe 12,700
(15) Mark Trapp 8,230
(16) Mitchell Tsai 7,970
(17) RAPatton (Robert Patton) 7,250
(18) J, Phil (Philip Glockner) 7,020
(19) Dobromir Hadzhiev 6,740
(20) Dave Winer 6,690
(21) Bret Taylor 6,180
(22) Maryam Ardakani 5,640
(23) mhmazidi (Hossein Mazidi) 5,560
(24) Steven Hodson 5,370
(25) Corvida 5,050

NOTE: Google page counts vary quite widely from day-to-day (so +/- 25% might not be unusual). Google also tailors searches based on your personal history, so everyone's searches are different. Also, people might be mentioned in the text (as opposed to using FriendFeed). These are Google searches for "personName site:friendfeed.com".

Google pages (comments, likes)

German-speaking:
(1) benedikt 3,130 (456, 516)
(2) Dieter Schwarz 2,710 (270, 279)
(3) marcel weiss 1,730 (200, 323)
(4) Timo Heuer 1,470 (251, 294)
(5) Fu_ 1,165 (174, 293)
(6) Klaus Eck 1,060
(7) Thomas Frütel 1,020
(8) Johannes Kleske 859
(9) Alexander Ebel 792
(10) cbgreenwood 700
(11) Marco Sascha Sven Hoppe 519
(12) Max Hartmann 511
(13) Ansgar Wollnik 481

Sweeden
(1) Hakan Dahlstrom 710 (59, 219)
(2) Rutger Blom 99 (32, 25)

NOTE: Google page counts vary quite widely from day-to-day (so +/- 25% might not be unusual). Google also tailors searches based on your personal history, so everyone's searches are different. Also, people might be mentioned in the text (as opposed to using FriendFeed). These are Google searches for "personName site:friendfeed.com".

Jason Calacanis 28,100 - An example of why this analysis doesn't work. Jason's mentioned in a lot of pages, but he's barely started using FriendFeed. If we could somehow compare the (a) post count (b) comments & likes, that might be a better measure of activity. The ranking algorithm might take soe tinkering because people like Veronica might be feeding a lot into FriendFeed but not using FriendFeed very much.

- Mitchell Tsai - CEO, Spiritual Business Companions : FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Facebook, Tribe.Net