DISQUS

MarinaMartin · 1 year ago

Ironic that you posted this today, Louis, because as of this past week TweetStats has been rendered unusable by anyone new because Twitter only allows access to your last 200 tweets. (In fact, Damon can clarify this, but I wonder if this somewhat skewed the recent low numbers.) Their official response to this problem was "I don't know," which did nothing to encourage me to stay with the service.

I am still somewhat on Twitter but focusing my efforts on Identi.ca (which is where I saw the link to this article). I'd love to see you and anyone else reading this chat more over there, instead of just using it to alert to new blog posts. The community (and feature set) is growing quickly and I'm excited that we may have a viable alternative.

christopher carfi · 1 year ago

adjust for seasonality.

Louis Gray · 1 year ago

The recommendation being that due to the summer months, I should anticipate what level of slowdown? 10%, 20% or 50%? I suggest the drop-off seen on almost all the active accounts was much higher than mere seasonality.

Ken Sheppardson · 1 year ago

It might be interesting to overlay the same users' FriendFeed stats. I'll bet you the total number of actions taken or items posted have remained relatively constant... or at least constant after adjusting for seasonality.

Calvin Freitas · 1 year ago

Another part of the problem is changes to the Twitter interface that prevent users from going back more than 10 pages in their history. TweetStats relies on this ability to grab information about older tweets since the last time it calculated your graph. With the new limits, TweetStats data is not currently reliable as there's no functioning Twitter-approved API method to go back further than 200 tweets in a user's history.

@dacort tweeted about it here: http://twitter.com/TweetStats/statuses/868447439

The conversation between @dacort and @al3x is available in a conversation in the Twitter Development Talk Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-developm...

Louis Gray · 1 year ago

Marina Martin alerted us to that recent change as well. The issue of only being able to grab the prior 10 pages (or 200 items) prevented me from running this data on a number of users who hadn't previously logged into TweetStats. They often showed two months of zero tweets, where there was actual activity, or in other ways, showed bad data.

Examples:
Duncan Riley: http://tweetstats.com/graphs/duncanriley
Jesse Stay: http://tweetstats.com/graphs/JesseStay
Steve Rubel: http://tweetstats.com/graphs/steverubel

In contrast, I am pretty confident about the data shown in the graphs used in the blog post.

dacort · 1 year ago

Regarding the data in TweetStats. It was unfortunate that I wasn't able to get access to the Jabber feed prior to it getting shut down, or these stats would have been more reliable.

As it stands, if a bot or user hit the graphs page for a user and it hadn't been updated in 3 days, TweetStats would automatically update. For top bloggers/tweeters like those posted above, this probably helped keep the data somewhat current. I've changed this to 1 day at this point to help with the recent pagination changes.

I may also try to utilize Gnip to keep stats up to date. Over 20,000 people have used TweetStats at this point, and I struggled for a while as to how to keep the data up-to-date, especially once Jabber went away. Gnip can make this easier, but I hope that Twitter can provide the type of data access they used to someday soon. It is now impossible to retrieve Tweets retroactively, for the time being.

That being said, I can understand if their new round of funding has placed limits on their primarily value - the huge database of user data. We have already seen evidence of this in that it was stated PubSub will only be made available on the terms that no resyndication of content will be allowed.

Twitter is growing up and we are experiencing their growing pains right along with them, unfortunately.

Thom Allen · 1 year ago

Hey Louis,

I can't really trust these graphs. When I pulled my stats from TweetStats, it showed zero tweets for all of April, May and June 2008. Zero tweets for three straight months? I think not.

Maybe people are also finding it difficult to be the conversation all the time. Hard to manage several thousand people on a daily basis.

I do agree though, instability has impacted stats, and ultimately the loyalty of some users.

Louis Gray · 1 year ago

Thom, some commenters above have mentioned that Twitter has recently reduced the amount of data available to TweetStats, so the program can only view your last 200 entries. If you have not recently checked in with TweetStats, or this is your first time, you will show no activity, as you mention.

Chris Brogan · 1 year ago

In my case, I'm actually consciously using it a bit less. For me a "bit" is funny. But I am using it less. One reason is that I'm much more busy. The other reason is that I'm shifting into FF like the rest of the nerds. The other other reason is that it's harder to use Twitter when it's down.

Jesse Stay · 1 year ago

Chris, I think this is a lot of it - I don't think people are necessarily replacing the core elements of Twitter (well, I am, as is Marina Martin and a slew of others due to their frequent outages and poor service), but rather have found better uses for news gathering and discussion in FriendFeed. Twitter, Identi.ca, etc. still have their place though - I just think that now there are other alternatives out there you'll see Twitter and similar services like identi.ca used more and more as what they were originally built for - pure micro-blogging services (which ironically is what Twitter is re-building it not to be)

Corvida Raven · 1 year ago

Wow! What a huge drop off. I didn't realize I hadn't been using Twitter as much lately. Maybe I should follow up your post with a post about why the Twitter outage isn't the only reason my tweets are down.

Thom Allen · 1 year ago

I would love to hear why. As Chris stated above, it isn't all about the technical problems Twitter has experienced.

drewolanoff · 1 year ago

This is super interesting Louis. I actually felt like I tweeted more in June/July, but maybe I think it's because of the downtime like you mentioned, plus the fact that I have used it recently to jump into conversations to take "offline", rather than my normal "hey i'm eating lunch"