“Your Twitter profile is worth: $108″… but how?

One of the first things I saw when I opened up Twitter this morning was the below post from @paulrasmussen

Being the ever curious person I am, I decided to have a click on the link and see what all the values were about. Assigning a monetary value to my profile? Could I possibly use this twitter value to buy myself a new pair of shoes?

So I had a look, and relieved that I was not required to enter my password anywhere (it is optional), I entered by username and BAM!

Cool! That’s enough money for a pair of shoes! How’d they work it out? …and that’s where things started to fall apart. TweetValue was only happy to give me vauge details about someone’s Ph. D algorithm and public information. Well, blah. That feels a bit like selling me a car but not disclosing the size of the engine, no?

So being a bit curious and only slightly bored, I decided to google Jonas and TweetValue and see if I could make any sense. Was this a massive phishing scam for those that opted to enter their password? Was there an interview with Jonas Lejon anywhere? Is he even real? This is what I found in brief:

• It was released around November 2008
• Jonas is indeed real, he is a web developer
• It’s been compared to Twitterank and Twitter Grader
• NOONE can tell me about the measurement

So what does it actually achieve?  It’s a bit of fun, sort of like a popularity test while also helping to raise awareness that social networks have value and influence, which larger companies are now starting to pay attention to.

I know it’s not designed to be much other than a superficial tool, but it did spark my interest in deeper questions. How do you assign financial value to a social network.. or social capital for that matter?  What do the calculations look like?