This post examines the followers of some popular Twitter users as the final installment of a multi-part series about exploring Twitter influence by asking the (Freakonomics-inspired) question, What do Tim O’Reilly, Lady Gaga, and Marissa Mayer all have in common? Although it may initially seem like an obnoxious question to ask, some of the answers may intrigue you once you begin to take a closer look at the data. (Although dashingly good looks might be one thing that they all have in common, we’ll let the data do the talking and stick with Twitter followers as the basis of computing similarity for this post.)

"The total number of followers that Tim O’Reilly, Marissa Mayer, and Lady Gaga all have in common amongst the three of them is still about 25k accounts."

That's it?!?!

Twitter is much smaller than I thought.

Lots of interesting things turn up once you start to crunch the numbers, and this post was really just the tip of the iceberg. (Tons more data fodder on hand to do some follow-ups later.) But yes, I think Twitter is probably a lot smaller than we all think, and I'm really curious to know how many of the ~900M registered accounts are "real/active" accounts. I guess this is why the "monthly actives" were so important as a metric for the IPO.

totally off topic, but have you considered bumping your font size up and using a higher contrast? I found your site almost unreadable, and it's first thing in the morning when my old eyes are not yet weary... and since you write A LOT and it's stuff I WANT TO READ it'd be great if it was readable. http://contrastrebellion.com/