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One of the things that I wanted to include in the event tracker was statistics to see how many tweets happened on each day and for each hash tag. I finally had a chance to add UI for that to the application, and I’ve made a few other usability changes as well. Access the updated photo & tweet tracker.

Improvements

Hash Tag Categories

One of the things that I really like about the application is that the hash tags which are tracked are stored in an external XML file, so that if you want to add (or remove) tags during the course of an event, the application doesn’t have to be recompiled.  Instead, just update the hash tag XML file, and those changes will be reflected in the application.  That made it easy to add tags during ALA. However, ALA is a large and complicated conference, and eventually enough tags were added that the list no longer fit on one screen for particular screen sizes (such as my netbook).  In order to address this, I added categories to the hash tags–main (for the main conference hash tags), general (for general, conference-wide hash tags), and division/round table (for, you guessed it, hash tags to do with divisions and round tables).  The “Select Tags” UI was updated to reflect these categories, resulting in a much better experience that allows you to see all the tags and interact with the dialog more easily because of the reduced size.

Statistics

There’s also new button in the upper right labeled “View Stats”.  This provides a view of the total number of tweets for each day of the conference, as well as the total number of tweets for each hash tag.  The data can be viewed as a chart or a table.  It’s interesting (and not particularly surprising) to see the trend.  Perhaps eventually I can add a by day and hash tag, but given the number of hash tags that could get messy.

Refresh

There’s now the ability to refresh either the photos or tweets using the refresh button at the bottom of each pane.  Keep in mind that it only updates the tweet archive every 5 minutes, though.

Numbers

Shortened URLs

Recently, @ranti made a point about twitter archives that I thought certainly applies to this project: A lot of twitter backup efforts might not work well unless if they can automatically reverse the shortened URLs back to the actual URLs. I was interested in seeing how many shortened URLs there are in all the tweets from ALA.  Out of over 10,000 tweets from the conference, at least 1000 have shortened URLs in them.  The most come from bit.ly, with 613, followed next by tinyurl.com with 121.  Other shorteners included: is.gd, ow.ly, trunc.it, tiny.cc, eepurl.com, cli.gs, tr.im, foxyurl, budurl.com, snipr.com, short.to, u.nu, icanhaz.com, ur1.ca, digbig.com, snurl.com, and flic.kr. That’s quite a few!  I’m not sure if most (or even any) of them have APIs for determining the full link for a shortened URL, but that’s something which would be great to archive as well.

Overall

As of now, here are the overall statistics for tweets from ALA 2009.

Totals:

Tweets: 10434

Authors: 1338

Hash tags:  498 (Tracked by app: 18)

By day:

Before: 765
Thursday: 680
Friday: 1380
Saturday: 2390
Sunday: 2250
Monday: 1725
Tuesday: 589
Wednesday: 340
After: 316

By tag:

#ala2009 – 9523
#ala09 – 422
#alacouncil – 82
#membership – 56
#mobile_lib – 50
#totebag – 291
#unala2009 – 451
#acrl101 – 22
#ala09_is – 8
#ala2prom – 27
#lib2.0 – 118
#ttt2009 – 35
#toptech – 43
#bigwig2009 – 13
#clene09 – 10
#clenets09 – 6
#godort09 – 3
#rusaht – 6