Fun: FirstFollower Identifies Any Twitter User’s First Follower

Who was the first person to follow you on Twitter? According to the app FirstFollower.com, mine was someone I never followed back until today! Chances are you’re already following your first follower, but you probably don’t remember who they are and it’s interesting to find out.

Built by Russian developer Victor Babichev, FirstFollower appears to perform a function that’s relatively simple but in a much faster way than you can do manually. You could scroll back page by oddly numbered page through a person’s Followers list, but now this handy little app will do it for you. It’s also a very interesting way to find people who are close friends in real-life of Twitter users you admire.

It’s hard to know for sure how accurate the service is, particularly since Twitter changed the way it displays followers earlier this year, but Twitter founder @ev is said to have been followed first by @dom, one of the handful of people credited with creating Twitter in the first place.

The first person to follow @barackobama? Cori Schlegel, a contract web developer who’s worked on several projects for tech journalist Steve Gillmor and probably a good guy to know.

See also: The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Heroes on Twitter

Did you know that

Mary Hodder

was the first follower of both chronic innovator

Chris Messina’s new Twitter account

and our own

Alex Williams

? That’s enough to make you think that anyone Mary follows in the future deserves a close look.

Fun and useful! What more could you ask for from a lightweight little Twitter app? This is just a small example of the kind of social graph analysis that’s made possible by Twitter’s relatively open user data.

Don’t forget to come make friends with us at ReadWriteWeb on Twitter!