PeerIndex

» see peerindex.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

peerindex was the kind of tool marketing agencies bought and computer engineers in ankara never opened. i knew the name from techcrunch and readwriteweb around 2010-2011, when the "who is influential online" question was still treated as a solvable data problem. i never signed up. it was not built for someone using twitter to follow a small circle of colleagues, it was built for someone renting audiences to a client.

the company launched in 2009 out of london. azeem azhar had been a technology correspondent at the guardian and the economist, then had done strategy work at the bbc and reuters, then wanted to score the twitter graph. his cofounder ditlev schwanenflügel handled the technical side. the product was a per-user number, one to a hundred, meant to tell a marketer which twitter accounts were worth paying attention to inside a given topic.

by late 2014 peerindex was tracking more than 300 million twitter authors and had four years of continuous author history. that was one of the largest independent twitter databases anyone had built outside of twitter itself, which is why brandwatch wanted it. brandwatch was a brighton and london social-listening firm with about 300 employees, and they closed the peerindex acquisition on 16 december 2014 in a mix of cash and equity that reporting later placed around ten million pounds.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was for ~

the useful part of peerindex was not really the score. the useful part was the topic clustering underneath the score. peerindex classified authors into interest topics based on who they followed and what language they used, then ranked them within each topic. this was better than a global "how influential are you at everything" number, which is where klout got in trouble. peerindex sold this to brands who wanted a shortlist for a product launch: give us fifty parenting bloggers with a score above sixty and follower counts between five and fifty thousand. the score was the interface. the topic map was the value.

~ what got buried with it ~

brandwatch put azeem azhar in a senior product role and folded the peerindex data into their monitoring platform as an "influencer analytics" module. the standalone peerindex.com site went to a landing page and then to a redirect. the score, as a public thing that individual twitter users could look up on themselves, stopped mattering. azhar left brandwatch by 2016 to start the exponential view newsletter, which is what most people know him for now. the twitter graph he had scored underneath peerindex became closed data in 2023 when x turned off the historical firehose api, which means even the surviving research references to peerindex era author distributions are now impossible to reproduce.

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