Computer Tips From A Computer Guy

How annoying will it be to follow someone on Twitter?

Posted: 19 May 2009 03:23 AM PDT

Do you follow celebrities or friends on Twitter? Do you want to gauge how many times per day you will be getting updates from them? From Luke Francl and Barry Hess comes Follow Cost, which allows users to see basic twitter statistics of their beloved twitting contacts.

To use the simple tool, go to their homepage and then enter the Twitter user name of the person you are considering following. In the example below I entered John Mayer's user name. (I am just curious why Jennifer Aniston dumped this allegedly frequently Twittering douche-bag blues singer.)

Some lightweight graphics will appear before the output comes out. The result page contains the average updates per day and the rolling average of the last 100 updates.

In reverse, these stats will tell users how many times they read someone's Twitter posts per day. If you are paid by the hour and it takes you an hour to digest 10 of John Mayer's posts, then you just lost almost an hour of pay per day. 9.54 or almost 10 Twitter updates per day? Hmm, no wonder Jen doesn’t get why John can't find time for her – seems like he is really busy.

By the way, notice there is a "milliscoble" number under the numbers? According to followcost.com, "milliscoble" is the unit used to measure someone's follow cost. Here’s how they define it exactly:

One milliscoble is defined as 1/1000^th of the average daily Twitter status updates by Robert Scoble as of 10:09 CST September 25, 2008. At that time, Scoble had tweeted 14,319 times in 675 days, for an average tweets per day of 21.21. Thus, one milliscoble is defined as 0.02121 tweets per day.

Quite an interesting way to measure the “cost” of following someone. Read about it more on this link: http://followcost.com/about/milliscoble

Besides the follow cost, the result page also contains how many of the recent tweets are replies. It is supposed to give you an idea of the amount of interaction for someone's Twitter account. There is also the golden index where it counts how many of the recent tweets are precisely 140 characters.

So what’s your Follow Cost? Mine came out to be 21.38 microscobles for my Average Updates. Guess you can follow me on Twitter and not worry about being overloaded!