I follow some 80 odd people/ news sources on my twitter account. For a while I wondered which of these sources are most active on twitter. I picked a simple metric ‘# of status messages posted to twitter’ as the measure of activity. Using R I quickly wrote a program to generate my top 10 most active twitter sources.

Here is the bar plot of the result

## Prerequisite: Install twitteR package 'install.packages(twitteR)
## load twitteR package
library(twitteR)

##get handle to a twitteR user object (in this case for user d_lalit
tuser <- getUser('d_lalit')

##get list of friends of d_lalit
tfriends <- userFriends(tuser)

##create an array to store the name and number of status messages for each friend
friendsCount <- length(tfriends)
friendsName <- character(friendsCount)
friendsMsgCount <- numeric(friendsCount)

for (i in 1:friendsCount) {
  friendsName[i] <- tfriends[[i]]$screenName
  friendsMsgCount[i] <- as.numeric(tfriends[[i]]$statusesCount)
}

## prepare a sortedlist and extract top 10 values from the list
sortedlist <- sort(friendsMsgCount, index.return = TRUE, decreasing=TRUE)
top10friendsName <- character(10)
top10friendsMsgCount <- numeric(10)

for (i in 1:10) {
  top10friendsName[i] <- friendsName[sortedlist$ix[[i]]] ## index is stored under ix
  top10friendsMsgCount[i] <- as.numeric(sortedlist$x[[i]])
}

## plot the chart
barplot(top10friendsMsgCount, width = 0.25, names.arg = top10friendsName, horiz=FALSE, main="Twitter friends by activity count", ylab="Number of status messages", xlab="twitter friends", space=0.2, density=50, angle=45, cex.names=0.7) 

I realize the code is not optimally written. Any suggestions refine the code will be appreciated.

Update: 11/29/2011
In the latest version of twitteR package, the method userFriends() has been deprecated. You may replace line#9 in the above code as with the code given below:

tfriends <- tuser$getFriends()