Obama Blacklisted From Popular New App

At last night's New York Tech Meetup, all eyes were on Most Valuable Follower (MFV) co-creator Michael Schonfeld during the crowd-pleasing “Hack of the Month” session as he modified program code via an onstage screen projection, sending the site's new Facebook feature live to the roar of an excited crowd.

During the hack, one astute member of the meetup—which touts itself as the largest in the world—noticed something interesting on the screen.

The word omit and the word Obama.

It turns out the app, which is only nine days old, has a blacklist for people and organizations never to be included in the most-influential list. Tweeters such as YouTube, BBC Breaking, Hootsuite, Firefox, and, yes, Barack Obama are on that list. The app's founders do not mean the exiled parties any disrespect.

"The whole idea is to find the top five people who—if they had your best interest in mind—would yield the best results by retweeting one of your messages," Schonfeld told Portfolio.com. "We wanted to weed out those type of accounts that weren't likely to retweet your message."

Barack Obama has 12.4 million followers, which is pretty impressive. But he also follows 680,000 people. And his retweets? The White House, Obama for America from several different states, and several people who tweeted about their donations to his campaign.

If the app continues to grow in popularity, such a distinction in followers could drastically alter the way people use social networks—and, dare we say, limit Twitter spam and faux-Facebook friends.

MFV's creation is powerful in its simplicity: Go to the site and log in with a Twitter account, or log in with a Facebook account. That's it. The app then combs the respective account and immediately spits out the most influential follower.

The MFV site went live on January 31, two hours after the co-creator Alex Taub called Schonfeld with the idea at 6:30 a.m. By 9 a.m., the first version of the site was live. One day after the launch, Mashable picked up the story and traffic exploded, with the site nearly crashing.

Schonfeld and Taub also created a “viral trigger” that worked almost too well at attracting attention. After MFV identifies and shares the most influential follower, it offers four more most influential followers in exchange for a simple favor: tweet the app's message or post it on Facebook. And so, in just a matter of a minute or two, the app shares with the user the 10 most important people on the two biggest social-networking sites and simultaneously gets its own marketing message out to every friend of the user.

MFV analyzes each user’s followers, compares them to the number of people the user follows, and applies the ratio to their special “secret sauce” algorithm to determine which follower wields the most social-networking influence.

So far, more than 25,000 people have used the app, and although some big names have been excluded from the results, other big names are taking advantage of the service, including tech guru Michael Arrington, rockers The Smashing Pumpkins, and Jason Goldman, the vice president of product at Twitter.

Schonfeld said that especially startups with limited resources will benefit from this app. "You want to know how you should direct your efforts and who you should direct them to."

And with such a filter on followers, making the most of limited resources just got a bit easier.

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Michael del Castillo is a freelance reporter for Portfolio.com.