The reason that I believe that they are tracking links is partly due to this article:
http://bit.ly/qGT2j

I also have a hard time believing investors would put up millions of dollars, if they were not measuring web influence. I am sure they will figure out how to accurately measure the influence of RTs in relation to post velocity.

I think there are semantic differences that I are causing some misunderstandings between us. There is Influence and there is Engagement So, when I said I would submit that Following another twitter account also displays a similar level of engagement and logic as Lists. I was not referring to Following potentially having the same impact on Influence as Lists, but rather the act of intention (part of engagement) by someone to follow someone and the act of intention of adding someone to your Lists. Yes, currently it is a lot easier to add people to follow, as you point out, like Tweepular, but it is only a matter of a time before a “List-pular” comes out

Yes, velocity is accounted for in our Influence score, but it is part of a larger weighted computation.

We will have to agree to disagree about the relative significance of Lists as a measure of ones influence, especially as a stand-alone metric. It is simply not ready for prime-time.

Thanks for your comments about Twitalyzer.

I know that number of followers is not specifically taken into account in any individual metric, and that’s one of the reasons I like Twitalyzer - I’ve always felt Twitalyzer scores were a better reflection of my impact than, for example, Twitter Grader. However, I was under the impression that “update frequency” is taken into account - hence, “Velocity”. I’m not saying that I think it shouldn’t exist - there are certainly reasons that it’s valuable - but I was pointing out that it is still a fairly poor metric.

I disagree that Twitter following is just as important in terms of engagement as Lists. With programs like Tweepular - which allow a user to follow hundreds to thousands of accounts in hopes for a follow-back, the “following” number is nearing irrelevancy, in my opinion. A little over 4 months back, I did a “Twitter Experiment” used to analyze two separate accounts I’d created (@jaremy and @techshots). It was an experiment with an obscenely small sample size (2, over the course of a week :P), but my hope was to eventually do something more large-scale (which I have not done yet). I used the @techshots account to build a larger following through methods like auto-following accounts, mass following, etc. Whereas with @jaremy, I built the account organically (I’ve never followed anyone I didn’t care about). What I found was that despite a much larger following, my impact was much smaller. (Which is one of the reasons why I really felt Twitalyzer does an accurate job of analysis - it was the only service that showed those same results. Overall I found that an account with 1/4 the followers still had more click-throughs to links and a higher level of engagement (through RTs, @mentions). That impressed me. You can take a look at the study here: http://www.techshots.net/2009/06/make-friends-not-followers-twitter-experiment-part-2/ Just remember that it was conducted as a test more than as any kind of quantitative study. At some point I’d like to do a much larger scale analysis. But that must wait for a later day.

Lists are certainly not refined at this point. However, I still believe it currently offers a better portrayal of true influence than pretty much all of the other metrics. That said, you guys currently do a great job at Twitalyzer of truly measuring influence, and I’d expect you to take your time when adding a new statistic into your database.

Great to see that you’ve added tagging. I’d love to hear an update on how that is going over time. Sounds like it could be interesting.

No matter what, any sort of broad-stroke measurement will have its slight flaws here and there, but our goal is to be able to give a directional measurement of a user’s influence. Sure, the difference between a vScore of 1,000 and 1,050 is pretty negligible, but in the end it’s also a directional - compare it instead to a user with a vScore of 500, or 5,000.

It is really important to have ways to measure social media ROI, as it is so new. Right now there are two camps of people: those who get into social media because “everyone is doing it, and we have to!” and those who truly believe its possibility and importance. For the second group, it’s about proving how worthwhile social media campaigns are, and for the first group, once the shiny new appeal wears off, it’s important to have statistical measurements and analysis to fall back on.

Looks like we both agree that Lists are (potentially) a far better unit of measurement than the current metrics. However, only time will tell how important they truly are.

1) Either not as important to you (as those you have put on lists), or you just don’t often add people to lists - which is why it’s more important to look at the entire sample (ALL Twitter users) as opposed to an individual user or handful of users.

2) Not sure. But that may happen more and more often if Twitter changes gears from adding followers to adding Lists.

Answered your last question in response to the commenter above. However, here are some ways to measure Twitter influence:

-Link clicks
-Followers
-Retweets
-Mentions (@replies)
-Lists added

Currently we have incorporated bits of the first four metrics into Viralogy. They each have varying degrees of importance (that differ based on what you’re looking for/at).

What I mean by influence is the “impact a Twitter user has on an audience”. There are a great number of factors involved here, but think of it measuring the amount of value a Twitter user has. So it’s certainly not just the number of his followers (if no one is listening, his influence and value isn’t useful), and it’s not even simply the number of @replies or RTs (some users carry on more conversations, hence more @replies, some users’ content is just not as retweetable). What we’re trying to distinguish when specifically measuring “Twitter Influence” is how a user’s audience engages and receives a Twitter user’s content.

Additionally, at Viralogy, we are working to measure an ENTIRE person’s influence - eventually working to incorporate blog, Facebook and a number of different social media resources. With that, we should be able to eventually show impact THROUGH Twitter. However, it’s slightly more difficult to measure non-electronic impact in a broad-stroke way, so our metrics will likely be limited to influence online.