Comparing Twitter Followers

Tool 22 from 30 Twitter Tools For Managing Followers is http://tweepdiff.com/ and I just used it to compare @iteachag (610 followers; my co-worker who started on twitter about the same time as me) to my twitter account @anotherschwab (447 followers).  I then proceeded to tweet out the following breaking news flash:

Hey @iteachag we have 104 common followers and we follow 93 of the same people according to http://tweepdiff.com/

This is interesting information for two reasons.  One it tells me that between the two of us we are seeing about 15-20% of the same stuff.  Now I don’t know if the people we both follow are producing a majority of the “high quality” tweets but I would suspect so.  Given such a small number of users and the immense value both of us get out of it, I can only imagine how it must scale.  I’m guessing at some point stuff starts to get lost in the noise but for now, for me, I’m very happy with the information and interaction I’m getting out of twitter.

The second thing it tells me is that perhaps I need to branch out a bit more and start looking for some new people to follow.  Finding people that I might want to follow seems to be the major hurdle right now.  My twitter community was mainly built through participation in education technology events, following the active participants and then combing through their followers/following lists to find interesting tweets and following those people in return.  When lists were added I thought it might get easier to find people posting what I would find interesting, but it hasn’t really worked out for me that way.

I browse through wefollow every now and again but even that is hit or miss.  Not everyone who says they are in IT or Education actually tweets about those things.  I guess in that respect Twitter is more like building relationships in real life than I thought.  You have to go to where the people are and join in on the conversation if you want to make contacts.  I guess there really is no way around the social stuff when building a social network, is there.