Hot topics

social

Comment

MVF Reveals Your Most Valuable Twitter Follower, Facebook Coming Soon

Anthony Ha

View Staff Page

Anthony Ha is a writer at TechCrunch, where he covers media, advertising, and random startups. Previously, he worked as a staff tech writer at Adweek, a senior editor at the tech blog VentureBeat, and a local government reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing.... → Learn More

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012
Comments
mvf

Ever wonder which of your Twitter followers you should be sucking up to? Well, you can go to MVF and find out.

The app is a side project created by two startup guys — Alex Taub, who leads business development at Aviary, and Michael Schonfeld, a developer at Nerve Dating. Now, the idea of measuring online influence is nothing new, but where Klout and its competitors have built fairly complex scoring and measure influence in different topics, Taub and Schonfeld offer a simple app to ask a relatively straightforward question: “Who’s my most valuable Twitter follower?”

MVF (which, naturally, stands for Most Valuable Follower) already attracted some attention when it launched a couple of days ago, and since then, Taub and Schonfeld have been adding new features. Most importantly, they’ve improved their method of measuring “value”. Instead of just going purely by follower count (a number that can be inflated by following a lot of people), the measurement now combines total follower count with what MG Siegler dubbed the Golden Ratio — namely, the ratio of number of followers to the number of people you follow.

There’s a big viral component to the app, since it encourages you to tweet the result at your valuable follower — in fact, you’re required to do so if you want to see your second to fifth most valuable followers. So folks who roll their eyes at public obsessing/bragging over social influence may soon have something else to complain about, especially after next week, when Taub and Schonfeld plan to unveil a version of MVF for Facebook on-stage at the NY Tech Meetup. (They’re calling it “Most Valuable Friend,” which I find a little unsettling, though whether that says more about MVF, Facebook “friends”, or me is an exercise I leave to the reader.)

Oh, and my most valuable follower? Turns out it’s a certain tech blog. I was confused, at first, because I thought TechCrunch could give those guys a run for their money, but then I realized that TechCrunch doesn’t follow me. Ouch.