10 Yetis Insight: Life on Twitter

Hello, Daniel here, Lead Developer at 10 Yetis Digital and the creator of http://lifeontwitter.com. This blog post is to provide you with some insight into how the site was conceived, built and used. The idea actually came to me in early 2015 but due to client work we were only able to begin creating the app in early September. There were lots of very commercialised services already out there where you could analyse statistics regarding your Twitter account but we thought it would be nice to create a fun, user friendly, and attractive overview as to how users interact on Twitter.

How it works

The site works by analysing the users last 1000 tweets, looking at key data points such as when, who and what they were tweeting. Based on the results, we created each user a unique profile on the site (here is mine - http://lifeontwitter.com/user/ddarrko). This ensured each user was able to share their profile with friends and therefore driving engagement.

There is a reason we settled on using the last 1000 tweets only. Unfortunately, the Twitter API only allows us to retrieve the last 3200 Tweets from each profile however it will only allow us to retrieve these tweets 200 at a time. This means each time we retrieve 200 tweets there is another call to the Twitter API, another HTTP request and each one of these slows down the app considerably. After some internal debate we decided that 1000 tweets provide us with enough data to generate an accurate profile for each user.

The app was built using pure PHP, HTML & CSS - for those amongst you who are interested in all that jazz, I made the code open source on Github here.

Let there be users

We launched the site in the afternoon on the 22nd September by sharing the URL from our internal Twitter accounts. By sharing the URL from our personal accounts it meant the audience were mainly in the creative, tech, and social fields. This worked very well for us and we saw extremely high levels of engagement with users who shared the app across social channels.

At around 10pm that evening I received a Twitter notification from @producthunt- informing me Life on Twitter had been submitted to the site and I had been added as its maker. This helped drive additional, relevant traffic and engagement. We actually ended up having 500 upvotes and came only second to a new Uber venture on the 23rd September.

The Results

The number of people using the app is something that, even now, continues to increase and in addition to high numbers of users the site was also featured on several high profile sites such as The Next Web. In the end we had tens of thousands of visitors and over 10 thousand profiles created.

We also had lots of nice tweets from some pretty cool, influential people, some even within the Twitter organisation. I have included some of our favorites below:

Life on Twitter visualizes your last 1,000 tweets http://t.co/FPZAcd1wY6 pic.twitter.com/TcwbpJLH2o
— The Next Web (@TheNextWeb) September 24, 2015

Nette Spielerei von @ddarrko: http://t.co/72ax7I8wzi">http://t.co/72ax7I8wzi Kurze Analyse deines Twitter-Accounts.
— Rowan Barnett (@rowbar) September 26, 2015

Una app que analiza nuestra cuenta de @Twitter usando nuestros últimos 1000 tweets - http://t.co/YzJjvHcV7A
— Boris Lizana (@BorisLizana) September 23, 2015