Recent work done at HP Labs, the exploratory and research group for Hewlett Packard, shows what most of us suspected as being true all all along; that just because a person has a lot of followers, it doesn’t mean they have a lot of influence.
In September 2009, using an algorithm they devised called the IP (Influence/Passivity) algorithm, a team of researchers from HP Labs continuously queried the Twitter Search API for 300 straight hours for all tweets containing the string of letters 'http'. Finding this string in a tweet would indicate the presence of a URL, and demonstrate that a web page was being shared or retweeted by means of a link.
