The ability to download your tweets isn’t exactly news, from the moment it was announced the general response was encouraging, yet confused – why would you want to?
Well, since I noticed that this option had become available on my profile I wanted to give it a go and do some mild number crunching. I didn’t exactly know what I’d find, but here goes!
My First Tweet
Pancakes did not go too great- not actually pancake day, there is still a little bit of confusion about when that is… maybe thats just me — Chris Green (@chrisgreen87) February 28, 2009
As you can see, this first tweet was nearly 4 years ago and I certainly was finding my feet as to what exactly I wanted to share and what was worth sharing. If this first tweet is how I am remembered when I’m gone, I wonder what sort of picture it would paint of me!
First Ever #Hashtag
One of my colleagues yesterday was saying how tricky it was to teach a client about hashtags and how they work, at the time I thought this was daft, I’d been using them for years. As you can see I wasn’t exactly confident of their use when I was first introduced nearly 4 years ago!
is confudled by hashtags… ack – brain isn’t really working! — Chris Green (@chrisgreen87) March 14, 2009
My hashtag training was given by Stephen Fry for the #Followmestephen tag – I can’t remember what exactly this was for, but I have him to thank him for the first exposure to “advance” twitter use.
@stephenfry hashtags eh? #followmestephen This one work? Ta muchly — Chris Green (@chrisgreen87) March 14, 2009
How Many Hashtags?
Well, since my education in the world of hashtags I wondered how much I have used them since. Only 864 (7%) of my tweets have included them, so here’s a pie chart, just because:
From what I saw I only used three hashtags in that first year, so whilst I learnt what they were, it took much longer to start using them regularly.
Mentions (@ Messaging)
Mentions (or @msgs as the cool kids called it back in 2009), is one of the most important parts of Twitter and looking back over my life in tweets, it’s featured very heavily. From moving in Writing, Games and Digital Marketing communities in Twitter, I’ve made some awesome friends and the mentions highlight this even more. Here was my first even Mention:
@smokyjoe44 I am still trying to work out how the buffet could cost nearly £40! lolcatz r greet — Chris Green (@chrisgreen87) February 28, 2009
This was me looking for a wedding reception venue (nearly a year before I was married, how organised was I??) and then making some remarks about Lolcatz… I was young, don’t judge me.
I’ve send 9857 Mentions, which is a hefty 77% of total tweets, here’s another pie chart, because I hear they make robots happy:
I have learnt a few lessons from mentions – they can make twitter feel like a very limited chat room, and the more people you target the less room you have to actually say anything – it gets a bit daft really. But overall the biggest lesson is, if you want to get anywhere on Twitter (or any social media) interaction is the key!
Most Used Method of Tweeting
As technology changes so quickly and my adoption to mobile devices has increased I thought this would show how I’ve tweeted from different sources. If I had longer I’d plot this as methods of tweets against time – but this graph still tells a story of sorts:
Tweetdeck is my most used method by a looooooooong way, I was on it fairly early on (before they were bought by Twitter in 2011), lost interested with it and now it’s my primary method again. Tweetdeck, from what I can see has benefited so greatly because it simply does Twitter better than Twitter has for some time – especially with mobile apps!
Echofon was a plugin for Firefox which offered a lighter weight way to check my tweets, although this stopped working so I ditched it and stuck with Web for some time. Yes there’s also Windows Phone on the graph, I own two Windows Phones – moving on!
When I tweeted
I had actually made a tweets against time histogram for this, but it looked pretty meaningless with the amount of data in it – 12,845 tweets over roughly 4 years – so instead I broke it down into the last 4 years (excluding 2013) and made another nice chart:
What does this tell me? Well, 2009 was a slow year – in fact there were multiple “It’s been a while since last tweet” style messages then. Although as you can see in 2010 I got bitten by the Twitter bug and my usage peaked in 2011. This was when I was most active as a freelance writer and Twitter was my primary method of networking – it seemed to work well enough at the time.
This is not to say I didn’t see the potential in Twitter back in 2009, I was feeling a little let down by Facebook then (a feeling that has only increased since!) and worded it rather strongly here:
I find it hard to believe that Facebook is the apex of social interaction… I kinda think of it as a blue and white trough — Chris Green (@chrisgreen87) August 12, 2009
2012 saw my usage drop off a lot, I expect this was down to having a full time job and an overall lack of procrastination time too.
Rather than procrastinating on Facebook, I’ve now moved to Twitter — Chris Green (@chrisgreen87) April 1, 2009
One final thing to add here, my most number of tweets on any given day was 119 – roughly 8 tweets an hour (while I was awake). This was during my games writing days, from what I can find it seems like there was a new trolling games article written and the blog-o-sphere I was in erupted – apparently I was part of that.
That Was My Twitter Life…
So that’s it, there’s no doubt more that can be said about this, although whether it needs to be said is another story – the very issue I had when I started tweeting, the irony! I’ve sent a lot of tweets and spent a lot of time on the social network over the last 4 years and I don’t expect that’ll change any time soon. Whilst being able to download my personal Twitter history was quite good, there’s no real significance in it to anyone besides myself really, now if you could access the worlds tweets – the stories they’d tell!
I’ll close with one final except – I can’t believe I nearly forgot about this!
I hope Sainbury’s security guard is alright, i may… or may not have, knocked him over with a trolley — Chris Green (@chrisgreen87) March 30, 2009