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.
