I was wandering about Twitter tonight, looking for more people to follow, when I started to wonder just who has the most followers on Twitter. Some of more famous names came to mind, but in most cases they've made thousands of updates, too. Lots of work, quite frankly, so I decided to try and find the most efficient person on Twitter:

Who has the highest People per Update (PpU) ratio on Twitter?

We'll keep the math easy: Followers / Updates

I thought I'd try the easy ones, popular tech people must have lots of followers, and they do, but the problem was they also use Twitter a lot, so their ratio isn't as high as you might think:

Then I realized, of course! The Mars Lander is the current darling of Twitter, that must be it!

Almost breaking 100 followers per update. Really efficient, but that's a long way to go just to get people to follow you on Twitter...

Which leads me to the user that actually got me started on all this, and who I THOUGHT was a a winner -- Toronto's very own Cory Doctrow @doctorow who hasn't added an update for about a year ( his last Tweet? "I felafel about my dinner" ). He's a busy guy, involved in lots of things, no time for Twitter, that's cool. But look at those statistics!

That gives him a PpU of just over 136! Even a simple update like "My dad has a tiny bladder" added 136 new followers!

But then I realized that I was missing the obvious here, and that there was one person with more of a draw than a space robot or a science fiction writer/activist - Barack Obama @BarackObama with DOUBLE the PpU ratio at 273 followers per update! You can't beat that, Cory...

Here's the data I was using, which also helps display the differences of scale:

Leave a comment if you can find someone who has a PpU even close.