BBC NEWS | dot.life | This was dot.life - a blog about technology from BBC News.Rory Cellan-Jones is the BBC's technology correspondent.Maggie Shiels is the BBC's tech reporter based in Silicon Valley. Update: Rory and Maggie have now moved to dot.Rory and dot.Maggie.

Your 'Twitter Value'

Maggie Shiels
3 Feb 09, 09:59 GMT

We all like to think that our words and our musings are worth something - that they have real value and real meaning.

Well, in the world of Twitter, the popular microblogging service that restricts you to 140 characters, there is a way to find out just what those bon mots add up to in terms, apparently, of dollars and cents.

I would like to stress that I know I am setting myself up for a fall here, but please keep the put-downs to a minimum. Thanks to a new service called TweetValue.com my so-called "bling-bling" rating tops out at $62 (£43.66) .Yeah!

In my defence, I have really only been a regular tweeter since the middle of December.

I looked up the tweetvalue of my lovely colleague Rory Cellan-Jones, and he comes in at a stonking $350 (which would be £246.47 if the figures were real). The recently-started BBC is at $3,305 (£2,327), but - get this - Stephen Fry is off the charts at $5,552 (£3,909).

The site says that the service was created in four hours by the Swedish entrepreneur and developer Jonas Lejon and is "calculated with a Ph.D algoritm that is based on the public information available on your Twitter profile" [sic].

Nicholas Deleon at CrunchGear reckons the service takes into account "the number of followers you have, how frequently you tweet, how many @replies you get, etc".

And, in case you are wondering who tops the TweetValue list, it's the leader of the free world. President Barack Obama is currently worth $41,150 (£28,978) and he hasn't tweeted since 19 January, Martin Luther King Day.

And while my self-esteem might have taken a knock or two there, it got a real thumping when I visited a similar kind of service called whatsyourtweetworth, which aims to tell you what advertisers would pay to auction ads on your Twitter page.

My value really plummets here and comes in at an ego-bruising $17.58 (£12.38) an advert. Rory fares much better at $174.65 (£122.99), while the BBC really is currently in the doldrums at $7.79 (£5.48).

Okay, enough mindless fun - time to get back to real life!

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This is dot.life - a blog about technology from BBC News.

Rory Cellan-Jones is the BBC's technology correspondent.
Maggie Shiels is the BBC's tech reporter based in Silicon Valley.