UPDATE : As of last week UBER Twitter Stats are offline. The account used for replying to requests was tagged as spam and blocked. I don’t plan on moving to a new account. Instead I am going to work on a replacement which should rock even more.

Continuing my pursuit of the Manic Innovation Challenge I am proud to release my newest *dumb* idea: UBER Twitter Stats!

NEW UPDATE – Based on some tips (thanks: Brian Katz @bmkatz) some of the details haved changed below to make UBER Twitter Stats work a little easier. The same old command style still works. But the newer one is much easier.

Written in 100% Ruby and running in the cloud, UBER Twitter allows you to ask me (technically my cloud-like proxy @myubertwit) for interesting recent stats about your Twitter account. It is really quite simple.

Send a tweet to my app account (@myubertwit) with the text: “<command>”. With the command being one of the following:

1. My Word Count – Will reply with the top 20 words you used recently. This automatically strips out very common words. Shortcut: ‘mwc’
2. Mention Word Count – This will reply with the same as the above but for tweets that mention or are to you. Shortct: ‘mmwc’
3. Who I Mention – This will list the top 20 people you talk to or mention in your recent tweets. Shortcut: ‘wim’
4. Who Mentions Me – This will reply back with the top 20 people who have mentioned you the most lately. Shortcut: ‘wmm’

If you get stuck just send ‘@myubertwit ‘help’ to get the instructions back in a tweet.

Depending on timing response may take up to a minute. Also, 90% of this work was written while I was chilling in a cigar bar with some friends. So while I do have *some* error handling, it ain’t much . It should handle Twitter API limits and does a decent job of trying to iterate and gather as many tweets as possible. For some high volume users (Like @Beaker) it gets pretty close to a 1,000 tweets per request to analyze.

I WILL be releasing the source for this soon. I have to strip out some private stuff first. And this week I will be attending VMware Partner Exchange, Cloud Connect, and one other event along with a ton of meetings. Which means it might be a week or two before I have time to post to Github for everyone.

Feedback is king – let me know if you like it or if you have any good ideas to add!

.nick

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