Tweeterboard: Who Does That Person on Twitter Think They Are?
Like it or not, there's a whole lot of conversation going on via microblogging service Twitter these days and it cannot be ignored. — Let's say you've subscribed to a search feed for your company's name (via Terraminds) …
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter spent 2007 crossing over from novelty to business signal: O'Reilly Network was twittering household appliances back in March, and by May James Governor was arguing that if markets are conversations then Twitter is money. The infrastructure around it has grown just as fast — Twype.exe pipes tweets into Skype status messages, and Terraminds lets companies subscribe to search feeds on their own names.
The case for measurement tools is already concrete: one blogger reported Twitter as a top traffic referrer with over 2,000 referrals in 30 days, while a 12-hour outage on December 15 exposed how much routine communication now depends on the service. Into that gap steps Tweeterboard, which ranks and profiles Twitter users — and Web Strategy's same-day verdict, 'Finally, a Twitter Measurement Tool that works,' suggests the demand was waiting for it.
First-order effects
- Companies using Terraminds search feeds to monitor mentions of their name can now attach identities and rankings to the people doing the talking, turning an anonymous mention stream into a list of profiled individuals.
- Twitter users gain a public score they did not choose to compete for — visibility and standing on the service become partly determined by a third party's algorithm rather than by follower counts alone.
Second-order effects
- A third-party analytics layer around Twitter hardens into a category — Tweeterboard joins Twype.exe and Terraminds as tools built on top of the service — putting pressure on Twitter itself to expose better data or ship its own measurement features.
- Once rankings exist, they become social currency: users have an incentive to optimize behavior for the metric, which shapes what gets tweeted and who gets followed.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, influence-scoring of individual participants becomes standard infrastructure for any conversational platform — the beginning of the reputation-metrics industry that treats online chatter as a rankable asset.
- Brands' reliance on external tools for listening and profiling foreshadows a structural split where the platform hosts the conversation but outside vendors own the measurement layer.
The trend: Microblogging is shifting from a conversational novelty to a measured, ranked channel, with third-party tools — not the platform — defining who matters on it.