ON THE FLY How news media are making friends in the world of social networking

Masters of the twitterverse

Last night the London Evening Standard joined the media discussion of the growth in popularity of Twitter with a spread which was trailed on the front page. However the paper made what now appears to be a common error and failed to accurately report the top users in the UK.

Bizarrely the paper seemed to select the most well-known users and forget about the figures in their 'UK Top Five'. If Metro's table last week was bad, this was absolutely awful. Jonathan Ross made it to number five in the Standard's column with 418,112 followers, despite there being six twitterers with more than a million followers in Friday's Metro table, and they had missed at least one.

The Standard failed to include technology blogger Pete Cashmore (1,517,687 followers), Samantha Ronson (1,142,233), author Neil Gaiman (1,112,288), Imogen Heap (1,092,608), and BBC Five Live's Richard Bacon (1,051,131) who was also absent from the Metro list. The only logic I can think of is that some of them now spend time in the US.

The errors were not confined to the fact box with the article referring to Sarah Brown as Britain's third biggest Twitterer, strange as she currently has 779,367 followers, putting her at most in eighth position. The paper's Science and Technology Correspondent wrote, "In fact, only the celebrity juggernauts of Coldplay and Lily Allen come between her [Sarah Brown] and the title of Britain's biggest Twitterer."

The ever-changing world of technology can be difficult to report because of its very nature. However if a paper is to have any authority in its reporting and analysis of social networking it needs to get the basic facts right.

The Standard's headline was 'Masters of the Twitterverse', ironic in more ways than one.