Sports Ranking and Twitter

The quickest way to spread information on a social network would be for someone of great "importance" to broadcast it. Which users are "important"? We attempt to address this question for Twitter. We view Twitter as a directed graph, with a directed edge from A to B if A "follows" B. Twitter is not used in the same way as the full Internet, so the "random surfer" model for the PageRank algorithm may not be the best model for Twitter. We adapt sports ranking methods to Twitter and present numerical results to show the inherent difference between PageRank and the proposed ranking algorithm.