Architects on Twitter – an exercise in Social Capital – #PeerIndex

As you may be aware, I’ve been finding architects on twitter since early 2009 (here’s my first post on the subject) and over the period I’ve looked at various ways of sharing them, be it putting them in a league by number of followers (sooo last year!), measuring when they joined twitter, locating them on maps, and trying to find out what they are talking about.

I have now found around 1400 architects from all over the world, including students –emerging professionals – practices, individuals and ex architects, all using twitter in some capacity or other. The fact that I have found them means that they profess to be architects either on their profile or by contacting me, which also means they value their architectural training as part of their being. Reading what they have to share is really interesting and I’m so glad I made a special twitter account to follow them so I get a real flavour of what they care about (in dozens of different languages too).

You can follow all the architects I follow, through the three lists I maintain – @subutcher/architectleague, @subutcher/architectleague2 and @subutcher/architectleague3.

The new Opportunity

For over a year I’ve been unable to create any type of ranked listing of the architects because the web based applications I’d used were discontinued by their owners, but now a new opportunity has arisen which I think might also be useful to members of the ‘Architect Twitter League’. It is called PeerIndex.

Last month I blogged about PeerIndex on my Just Professionals blog. I posted because they had been featured in the Sunday Times, putting together a list of the ‘UK Twitterati’. My post was called “PeerIndex and the Independent tells us nothing about Twitter” because I felt that the focus on celebrity and the ‘broad brush of the famous ignored its true worth as a home to the “niche, specialist, small world of the ordinary.” I can understand why teaming up with the Sunday Times is an offer you can’t refuse, but I think it has its downside, disguising the subtlety of what they are trying to achieve between the ubiquitous veneer of celebrity.

The conversation went offline at this point, and the discussions we had on the blog post led to several other ventures including the #tCnTop100 list of 100 top UK Built Environment twitter users. It also gave me the opportunity to think about how PeerIndex might help us get to know each other better, and become better at using twitter.

So I am now in the process of making a Group on PeerIndex called ‘Architects’. It lists all the architects I follow with @ArchitectLeague.

The list is ranked using PeerIndex’s topic-based authority rankings, which are still in development (the platform was only launched in January 2011 and is still in beta, so we are part of the experiment). The system is very complicated but I’ll be exploring it a bit more over on JustProfessionals if you fancy the techy stuff.

But in the meantime, if you would like to find out more about what PeerIndex says about your twitter use, how you can compare yourself with other accounts, then . When you join (by OAuth through Twitter) PeerIndex is able to tell you a lot more about your use of twitter than it can with users who haven’t registered.

If you’d like to be in my Architects Group and appear on the rankings there, and you are an architect, ex architect or studying architecture, comment below, or tweet me and I’ll add you.

I’d like to thank Azeem Azhar, CEO and Simon Cast, Head of Products & Engineering at PeerIndex for putting up with my rants and helping me set up this group, one of their first. I know they have plans to do many things with the platform, including its group function. Lets hope we can learn more about ourselves, and at the same time, help them share more about how our sector uses twitter.