Thanks to Facebook, Twitter, and similar sites, the number of people existing on the web dwarfs the population of individual countries. Facebook alone has a user population of 550 million, which is about 250 million larger than the population of the US.
That being said, as we rely more and more on social medial platforms for our information, we need to know who we are connected to, why we are connected to them, and most importantly how influential they are, so that we can be sure that we are getting the best and most accurate information.
That brings me to the concept of PeopleRank which has already become a hot trend and we at awesomize.me have been working on it since our beta launch last November. We are excited to announce the launch of our first version of PeopleRank today. I think our algorithm still needs some tweaking, but it's sufficient enough to help you all identify the most influential people on our site.
In a nutshell when you search for people, companies, products, services, and questions on awesomize.me, your search result will be listed based on the ranking they have received by the awesomize.me community. Those with the best and highest ranking show up on top.
And, no! if you are a spammer reading this, you won't be able to rank others up or down by creating multiple user accounts, because the ranking by a user with 95% score will be more powerful on awesomize.me than the ranking by a user with 0%-5% score. As more and more users join awesomize.me, I doubt you will be able to jack up the ranking for all your fake accounts to make them influential :-)
The concept is similar to Google's PageRank, but instead of determining the importance of a page based on the number of times it is linked by other pages, our algorithm determines the quality of people, companies, products, services, and questions based on the ranking by the community. So, a social play on Google's PageRank algorithm, but with humans at the center, instead of web pages.
Here are a few samples:
Search result for people in Social Media space on awesomize.me
Search result for companies in Social Media space on awesomize.me
Feel free to try out our search for products, services, and questions to see the result.
As you can probably realize, for our PeopleRank to be effective and accurate, we would need more and more people to participate in the platform. So, please check it out and let us know what you think.
Feel free to connect with me via awesomize.me