What a lot of people may have missed in the excitement about the 15-year-old Morgan Stanley summer intern (pdf online) saying teenagers don’t both with Twitter is this salient point about the value of profiles -“they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their ‘tweets’ are pointless”.

I have discussed the subject of how to use profiles to build community a few weeks ago, focusing on the value of a rich profile.

But I do digress, back to Twitter. If I use the application TweetValue it calculates my profile value as a number, $339 to be precise. The ‘About’ page for this service wittily reads: “This service was created in 4h by the Swedish entrepreneur and developer Jonas Lejon. The value is calculated with a Ph.D algoritm that is based on the public information available on your Twitter profile. uuhm. not really :-).”

So if instead I use Twitterrank I find my profile is higher than 90% of people, which sounds better to me, so perhaps I’ll stick with that as my profile measurement tool for Twitter. It even creates a unique url to come back to and check progress (I’ve gone down 3pts in 16 days😉

PS: By coincidence the next day the 28th July a new tool came out, TwitViewer.net, which claimed to show how many people had visited your profile. Sadly, according to Mashable, it turns out to be a Phishing Scam: “It’s unclear that this is phishing, as the site does let you know that it will send out the auto-tweet. It’s almost certainly not doing what it promises though, as there would be no conceivable way for it to know who has been visiting your Twitter profile. In short: be wary of this app, and if you logged in, you may want to consider changing your password.”

So perhaps the moral of this story is that (a) Teenagers don’t bother as you can’t if anyone’s visited your profile (b) Scammers think there’s a demand for such a tool. (c) There’s a need for a Twitter profile analytic tool a-sap.