How Many of Your Twitter Followers Are Real?

TwitterAudit – “exposing Twitter fraud since 2012″ — is designed to weed out the real followers from the fake ones and determine how genuine some accounts are about how they get their followers.

So we decided to try out the new service with @Limewit‘s 1,034 + followers.

Yay! Only 43 "fake" followers and a 96% Audit score. What's yours?

To get a better understanding of how this all works and what we can make of these results, we caught up with TwitterAudit co-creator David Caplan.

TwitterAudit debuted in beta just last week on August 2, after Caplan and his business partner David Gross had been working on it since mid-July. “It’s a side project for us and is still a bit rough around the edges,” Caplain said.

The idea for the service came about when the two were looking for ways to get more followers on Twitter. “It turns out it’s pretty easy to buy fake followers to beef up your numbers so we wondered whether people could be ‘audited’ as a way to expose ‘Twitter fraud,’” Caplain said. Most people assume that followers are earned, but that doesn't always turn out to be the case.

Caplan cites Klout and SocialBro as other programs that offer similar metrics. The differences are that Klout bases its “scores” on the activity of the account being examined, rather than the activity of its followers, and SocialBro gives great insight into the quality of followers.

With TwitterAudit, Caplan and Gross wanted to create a ”simple, free tool to quickly get an ‘audit score’ for any Twitter user and find out how many real, active followers they really have.”

Caplan confirms that the results are pretty valid from a statistical point of view. TwitterAudit takes a random sample of 5,000 followers (if the person has less than 5000, it looks at all of them) and examines their activity.

“This sample size might look small,” Caplan said. “For example if the person has millions of followers, but keep in mind that highly regarded polls taken in the USA only use a sample size of 1000 to gauge the entire country’s opinion!”

Still, he said that there can be a margin of error of 5-10%, and he’s working on a way to estimate that. Caplan also noted that the audit scores for users with followers in the millions can reflect the fact that about 30-50% of Twitter users are completely inactive. That’ll put a damper on things.

“I would say that any score above 40% should be considered good. Anything less and I would begin to worry.”

More metrics and statistics from @Limewit

Edited by Limewit Tech Blog

Photos courtesy of TwitterAudit

Written by Amanda Walgrove

Is Twitter Ruining the London Olympics?

illustrated by Blake Stevenson | Cnet

Twitter: The Phone Battery Killer

It's becoming a common theme to hear the cries of Twitter users regarding the short life span of their smartphone battery. Here's a good example, "If I didn't have twitter, instagram or any apps...my battery would last sooooo much longer," one Twitter user wrote.

When a phone is in the design stage, the engineers do not take into account how many apps will be running on the phone simultaneously, how many photos per day will be taken or uploaded to Instagram, how many tweets will be sent, emails read on Gmail, websites visited, videos watched, or how many Angry Bird levels will be successfully passed with three stars.

"We are basically given a list, from the software department, that informs us of what applications will come pre-installed with the phone. This is how we determine the expected battery life of the phone," says a cellphone engineer who wishes to remain anonymous.

The best solution to this dilemma? 

You could use your phone less but we know that is a stretch. How about getting a second battery so that you never run out of "phone time."

Just charge the dead battery and by the time your new one is completely depleted, you can swap it for the newly charged one. One user complaints, "I carry my AC adapter but it is so bulky and takes 3 hours to fully charge my phone. Sucks!" A spare battery is small, light, and ready to go.

For a great place to start shopping for an extra cellphone or smartphone battery, check out Limewit.com/phonebatteries.