2above.com

Twanalyst.com launched on Monday April 20, 2009. Within hours, the traffic exploded. The real hits came just 2 days later, as @twanlyst tweeted on 9:55 AM GMT, Apr 24th:

“This time yesterday, 4k hits, 100k total for the day. Today: 40k already!! Still running at 93% successful”.

That is, 8 hours into the day (UK time, he is UK based) the site already had 40k hits, 10 times more than just a day ago. To verify their traffic, I ran them through Alexa, a simple traffic measurement tool, its traffic rank stands at 5653, out of gazillions websites, for those who are not familiar with Alexa, 5653 is HUGE. Super popular stocktwits.com, endorsed by both tweetdeck and twitter stands at 21,147, that is at least 20 times smaller than Twanalyst (Twitter.com itself stands at 36). The following is the chart

Thanks to twitter, I got a hint from a person I follow and immediately liked it. What is this Twanalyst.com and why it went viral this quickly, this explosively? Well, in its own words:

Twanalyst analyses your Twitter profile and your last 100 tweets (if you’ve written that many yet) – then makes some sweeping judgements about your personality based on how often you tweet, how many friends and followers you have, the content of your tweets and so on.

Like OkCupid.com (a dating site started by a bunch of Harvard guys), it spits out what your “type” is by examining your tweets. And the results are very interesting: mine reads -

Personality: renowned obsessive fair
Style: chatty academic CELEBRITY

It also gives a quick tip for your tweeting:

Tips for your tweeting…
* Use hashtags to join in popular discussions or online events

I was hooked immediately, curiosity led me seek out the mastermind behind the project, Andrew Chapman, an “incorrigible generalist and professional writer, editor and designer based in Oxford, UK”. Success does not come over night, it turned out that Andrew has years of endeavor on trying out various types of projects, my understanding was few of them became big shots in terms of traffic. But Twanalyst.com is on its way to become dominant in a very interesting niches in twitterverse. How can I miss out an opportunity to get into his mind. As busy as I can imagine he is, Andrew was a very pleasant person, returned my simple email questions with full blown answers, which I surely enjoyed reading. So here it is, I hope you get some insights, inspiration.

- how did you come up with the idea?

Well, I created a LiveJournal personality test a couple of years back,
which went viral in a smallish way: most in one day was 20,000 hits,
and it still gets occasional peaks as a new group of people discovers
it – I had been struck by how popular memes are, and how much people
love doing quizzes that aim – seriously or otherwise – to tell them
about themselves. And I’d run bigger viral sites before, so had ideas
about what sort of things work.

But LiveJournal is largely a closed community – Twitter is much more
open, and I love the way you can find interesting strangers all the
time on it. So… I’ve been pondering a Twitter personality test for a
while, and doing little bits on it in spare moments. It’s something I
thought would be fun, and I haven’t seen elsewhere – but I also wanted
it to have serious uses, to give it longer-term appeal.

- how long did it take you to come up with the styles/types?

A few weeks of tinkering, I guess. I knew I could use ideas from the
LJ one and more particularly a thing called the Blogalyser I did which
never quite took off – particularly using readability indices to work
out what people’s general writing style is.

Because Twitter provides a good API, there’s interesting data to grab,
which reveals or implies various things about people – how often they
use the site, what sort of following they have, and so on.

The actual typing has gone through a few iterations, and I’ve
simplified some of it since I first put it together. One lesson I
learnt quickly: the main type at the end originally only had five
results, and 90% of people got just two of them. This meant everyone’s
results looked really similar, so not interesting enough to keep
passing on.

So, after a sleepless night or two I rethought it, and came up with a
more sophisticated analysis down to 15 types, using stats I’d already
gathered to make sure there was likely to be a broader spread.

I’m not claiming it’s a serious personality tool: it’s a bit of fun,
with a small core of sensible ideas lurking inside it. But people love
this sort of quick-results, ‘tell me about myself’ stuff – me
included!

Finally, as I said, I wanted it to offer something useful, too: at the
moment that’s focused on the ‘tips for tweeting’ , which are meant to
offer constructive advice that’s tailored to each user. Plans ahead
include giving users the facility to see how their
friends/follower/tweeting stats change over time, and a ‘who could you
follow?’ feature to suggest like-minded users.

Sorry, that’s probably way more than you wanted to know! Anyway, hope
that’s of interest, and thanks for asking. I shall be reading your
blog to learn more still about Twitter!

All the best; Andrew

PS The site has just had it’s 200,000th visit (4.5 days since it launched)!

better-twanalyst