Twitstat

Twitstat.com is an initiative of Michiel Berger from The Netherlands. He was looking for a nice tool to follow the Twitosphere. If you have been away for a couple of days, the Twitter interface does not allow you to quickly spot the most interesting topics being discussed within the community of your Twitter followers. He developed Twitstat.com as his own solution.

Twitstat monitors the Twitter messages from the users following the Twitstat account on Twitter. On Twitstat.com the detailed list of Twitter messages from the followers of Twitstat account on Twitter is shown. Twitstat.com also shows an overview by day of the total number of Twitter messages indexed and the top 10 of most active Twitter users for today and yesterday. Launched only on August 22, 2007, Twitstat is live for a couple of weeks. Currently the Twitstat account on Twitter is being followed by 96 other Twitter accounts, mostly from The Netherlands. The previous days around 800 Twitter messages have been indexed daily.


Twitstat also offers the possiblity to obtain statistics for an individual Twitter user. The picture below shows an overview of the Twitter messages from Erwin Blom, one of the most active Twitter users in The Netherlands (see also the Second state of the Dutch Twitosphere).


Another interesting feature of Twitstat is the possiblity to see how often and when a search string was present in the indexed Twitter messages. The picture below shows all Twitter messages containing the word "Twitter".


The graphs shown by Twitstat can be improved. Only the left most and right most columns are labeled with a date. The current graphs only contain columns for dates with Twitter messages, dates without messages are not shown as data points on the graph. The graphs are not a correct display of the time distribution of the indexed Twitter messages. For an example, have a look at the graph for search string "pownce". There were messages on 30-08-2007, 05-09-2007, 09-09-2007 and 11-09-2007. The graphs contains 4 columns, only two of them are labeled.


A very nice thing of Twitstat.com is that everything is also available as an RSS-feed. You can even get an RSS feed to find Twitter messages from a given Twitter user and a given search string. This RSS feed gives all Twitter messages from Marketingfacts containing "tinyurl".

Currently, Twitstat.com isn't even in beta yet. The number of Twitter accounts followed is rather limited. The response times of Twitstat are amazingly fast. Will this be also the case if Twitstat becomes more popular ? I can imagine that keeping Twitstat alive will require some funding (e.g. for the storage of data or the bandwith) in the future. Will Twitstat.com remain ad-free ?

If Twitstat.com becomes too popular there is a risk that its usefulness will decrease. I can imagine a situation in which a Twitter user from The Netherlands is interested in a specific topic discussed within the Dutch Twitter community. If this topic is also discussed in the global Twitophsere (indexed by Twitstat) the search results for the specific topic will probably contain a lot of Twitter messages in which the Twitter user is not interested in. The signal to noice ratio will decrease.