Twittruth Tells The Truth About How You Really Use Twitter
How do you really use Twitter? Do you retweet a lot of other peoples' content, share a lot of links and respond to direct messages? A new service called Twittruth will tell you the cold, hard facts about your own use of Twitter. It might sound trivial, but you could also say this service is an example of the kind of conversation data mining that will define some of the most exciting innovation in the future of the web.
Once someone has given Twittruth access to their account, you can learn a few things about how they use Twitter, too. Today I learned that I'm bad at replying to direct messages, I tweet a lot of things other than links and I only reference Twitter rock stars in about one out of 20 messages I post. How about you?
I can tell you that Tim O'Reilly retweets other peoples' content more than I do and he's more likely to be sharing a link when he tweets - but neither of us respond to more than about 1 out of 10 direct messages we receive! (We learned about this service because O'Reilly twittered a link!) PR star Steve Rubel? He's twice as likely to mention one of the top 1000 most followed Twitter users in his tweets as Tim or I are and he responds to more than half the direct messages he gets!
We've seen a lot of tools that analyze publicly available Twitter messages, something that other social networks like Facebook can only dream of doing because of privacy settings, but this is one of the first times we've seen an app ask for access to your private practices for aggregate analysis of those. The fact that the analysis is then made publicly available is a touch disconcerting, but it's probably not that big a deal.
Some of the statistics Twittruth comes up with are pretty silly ("how long does it take this person to read all their direct messages") and there's limited information available about people who haven't added themselves to the service, but it's fun and interesting to try out.
That's all well and good - but are you "normal?" (Isn't that what we all lie in bed wondering about at night?) Check out Vik Singh's very interesting analysis of 1 million public Tweets: he found that 19% of tweets contain links, 4% are retweets, 39% are replies and 19% are questions being asked. Isn't that fascinating?
The front page of Twittruth says that Chris Brogan almost always replies to messages he gets in under one minute! Whoa! That's awesome, but get back to work, buddy! Even the site's own disclaimer says that some of these numbers may not be accurate for users who haven't given Twittruth access to their account yet. None the less, I feel like I learned a little something about myself today - and I'm comfortable with what I learned.
If you like this kind of thing, check out this even more useful collection of bookmarklets for analysis of Twitter users that we wrote about last month.
We'll tell you the truth: we usually Twitter about our blog posts and our thoughts about the meaning of life. You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Doug Coleman, Jolie O'Dell, Dana Oshiro , Lidija Davis and Steven Walling.
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Oh look - I'm an "engager." That's a fun app!
That's good. I'm a Promoter, so I'm glad someone around here is engaging!
It's a real shame it's taking so long to process my account, because it has some interesting stats I'd like to see and they're presented quite simply. I'm likely to forget about it before it's done, and I'm probably not the only one, so that's a flaw in their service really.
Info on "chances of getting a DM reply" is way, way off—probably because so many spam DMs are being sent.
We try to respond to EVERY reasonable request for interaction via DM to us. (And if it's unreasonable we often respond and explain anyway.) We'll sometimes interact many times in a row to solve a problem for someone.
So this looks a bit more like a measure of how many spam DMs someone gets than how likely they are to respond, unfortunately.
why is it taking so long to process, i can't wait to find out about my activities on twitter....1940 sec and counting
Interesting %s
Posted by: Gary Walter
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July 6, 2009 1:24 PM
Took long enough. I'm an Engager. Small population of followers/following. Just as I expected. Good enough.
Cool.
Now I have another piece of data I need to obsess over. Thanks guys.
Though it's taking a bit time but surely it's going to reveal the truth,i must accept I'm very bad when it comes to DM.
@Sarah: Hey - fellow "engager" here!
This post makes me feel a little bit better about not getting a response to my last DM to Marshall. I know I'm not alone. No hard feelings, Marshall!
Bryan | @BryanPerson
Interesting twitter analysis tool. Can't wait to see who am I.
All these analysis tools would be even more interesting if they used the Twitter API not only at twitter.com but also on Laconi.ca instances such as Identi.ca which feature the Twitter API too - and are thus entirely compatible with any tool that uses it and cares to let the user change the URL to something other than Twitter.com. Besides, open microblogging is where all the cool kids are...
I twitterer!seems another interesting addition to the twitter phenomenon! so many innovations will keep every one interested, stats are persuasive & compelling at any level,so lets get this analysis device, quickly. Yours, Lyndon Sullivan. @lindano on Twitter.
Thanks Marshall for sharing info about Twittruth. Pretty cool app. Was excited to see that there are some steps taken in this direction.
I have attempted to envision a deeper thought in my blog http://shadablari.blogspot.com/2009/07/microblogs-has-macro-potential.html
Ok... that was REALLY LAME!
Hi Marshall and RWW,
Thanks for covering twittruth.com it was very surprising to see this earlier today!
The initial idea for twittruth.com actually came from wondering what the chances were of the "twitter rockstars" replying to a tweet. Twitter gives the illusion that some people are much more accessible than they actually are and that some of the "twitter elite" just talk amongst themselves (http://twittruth.com/?id=ashsimpsonwentz).
Having said that I'm a big fan of twitter and how it has opened up a whole new level of communication for everyone.
As for your concerns with asking for authorization and then making the details public, the authorization is only used to verify the person is the owner of the twitter account. All the information that stats are created from can be aggregated without a users permission (as has already been done for the top 1000 twitter users).
Thanks for the coverage,
Gary
Nice app indeed. Some people are just obsessed with numbers! ;-)
Twittruth Tells The Truth About How You Really Use Twitter http://bit.ly/ALTB3 [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/2500600317]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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July 16, 2009 10:03 AM
caramba, eu me dei mal nesse apps!!!:Por sinal muito bom APPS