It seems that we, as human beings, are fascinated by numbers. I’m not talking about a mathematical fascination although many people do find numbers interesting of themselves. No, what I’m talking about is a fascination with quantities, statistics and measurements. We use numbers to express value, make comparisons and to rank things, including ourselves.

This tendency spills over into almost every thing that we do and it is apparent that Twitter is no exception. Almost every day we will see tweets about follow numbers (or unfollow numbers), rankings and statistics. What do all these numbers really mean and where do they come from?

I’m fairly new to Twitter, but one thing that I have noticed in my few months of following and tweeting is that many people are confused about the numbers and some of the activities that take place around them. So let’s take a few minutes and see if we can understand some of what is going on.