Who was the first person to follow you on Twitter? According to the app FirstFollower.com , mine was someone I never followed back until today! Chances are you're already following your first follower, but you probably don't remember who they are and it's interesting to find out. Built by Russian developer Victor Babichev , FirstFollower appears to perform a function that's relatively simple but in a much faster way than you can do manually. You could scroll back page by oddly numbered page through a person's Followers list, but now this handy little app will do it for you. It's also a very interesting way to find people who are close friends in real-life of Twitter users you admire. Sponsor It's hard to know for sure how accurate the service is, particularly since Twitter changed the way it displays followers earlier this year, but Twitter founder @ev is said to have been followed first by @dom, one of the handful of people credited with creating Twitter in the first place. The first person to follow @barackobama? Cori Schlegel , a contract web developer who's worked on several projects for tech journalist Steve Gillmor and probably a good guy to know. See also: The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Heroes on Twitter Did you know that Mary Hodder was the first follower of both chronic innovator Chris Messina's new Twitter account and our own Alex Williams ? That's enough to make you think that anyone Mary follows in the future deserves a close look. Fun and useful! What more could you ask for from a lightweight little Twitter app? This is just a small example of the kind of social graph analysis that's made possible by Twitter's relatively open user data. Discuss
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Fun: FirstFollower Identifies Any Twitter User's First Follower
At the close of a whiz-bang year, OpenID has a lot to be proud of. With a community of 9 million sites that use OpenID logins and 1 billion individual users, OpenID has effectively revolutionized the way we are able to create and maintain portable identities. Best of all, it's not just bloggers and geeks who sang OpenID's praises: The U.S. federal government got on board this year, too. Sponsor OpenID accounts are enabled by such providers as AOL, Blogger, Flickr, Google, LiveJournal, MySpace, Verisign, WordPress and Yahoo with announcements of upcoming OpenIDs from Microsoft and PayPal. Sites that allow users to login with OpenID range from major retailers and music labels to news organizations and social sites. As for the government, at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, DC, earlier this year, the General Services Administration and several government agencies announced they would adopt OpenID as part of the White House's Open Government Initiative. Participating companies included Yahoo!, PayPal, Google, Equifax, AOL, VeriSign, Acxiom, Citi, Privo and Wave Systems. On the government side is the Center for Information Technology (CIT), National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and related agencies. Not only is the government's involvement a vote of confidence for OpenID's innovation; it also speaks to the product's security progress, which was spearheaded by security committee head and PayPal exec Andrew Nash. In addition to developing and spreading the OpenID product, there's also the OpenID Foundation, which appointed its first executive committee, including Chris Messina and Don Thibeau, in 2009. Portable identity is one of our favorite themes from this year, and we applaud what OpenID has been able to accomplish. What do you look forward to seeing from the product, the foundation and OpenID partner sites in the year to come? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Discuss
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OpenID Ends 2009 With 1 Billion Users
The newest premium research report from ReadWriteWeb is available for purchase and download now. Titled The Real-Time Web & its Future , the report is based on 50 interviews with engineers and executives building or leveraging real-time web technology. This is about far more than Twitter and Facebook. From a little startup called Nozzl Media delivering real-time public records to newspaper websites, to Aardvark's building a "real-time web of people" using social networks and IM, to the way the Red Cross uses the real-time web to save lives - this report will give you a broad and deep understanding of the state of the real-time web, directions things might go in the future and some of the key personalities advancing these technologies. Sponsor Compared to traditional analyst reports, we believe this product is more affordable, more in-depth and more effectively forward-looking than anything you'll find elsewhere. The report features: In-depth case studies of 10 organizations leveraging real time in a way that illustrates best practices or demonstrates inspiring innovation. Examples include: Warner Bros. Records, The American Red Cross and Superfeedr. Profiles of 20 people you should know and understand in order to understand and participate effectively in this market. People like John Borthwick, Ron Conway, Chris Messina, Monica Keller and Brett Slatkin. Sector overviews of the most heavily populated parts of the real-time web: search, stream readers and text-analysis middleware. Charts, graphs, visualizations and more. You can download the Table of Contents and a sample chapter at no cost, to get a feel for what's included. This report represents the best wisdom from thousands of hours of industry experience, compressed through hundreds of hours of interviews, now available to help you get a jump-start in this big new direction the web is moving in. 84 compact pages of research, all for a mere $300. Below is a matrix of big issues discussed in various parts of the report. We trust you'll find this research an invaluable resource. Purchase The Real-Time Web & its Future here. Discuss
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Now Available: The Real-Time Web & its Future
