Paul Boxley

2¹¹ tweets! Hooray!

It's been about a year since I hit 1,024 tweets. In that time a few things have changed; after four years working for the Forestry Commission I left to join the guys at ASMALLWORLD building and maintaining a huge Rails app.

I wondered what my mood had been within this period. One extremely unscientific indicator of mood is emoticons.

Emoticons

As you can see, I have been mostly :), occasionally :D, sometimes :( and hardly ever D: which is exactly how things should be, so that's good.

Retweets

Over the past year I've averaged 2.61 tweets a day.

229 of those tweets (about 22%) have been retweets. That's higher than I thought it would be, so I had a look at who I'd been retweeting:

Of the 229 retweets that I've made, 128 of those, or 55%, were retweets from users that I've only retweeted once. I don't even follow most of them. I wasn't aware how often I retweeted retweets, but the data suggests I do it quite a lot!

Of the people that I've retweeted three times or more, here's who I've retweeted the most:

I've colour coded the charts to group people together.

• In red are the people that I know through the Scottish Ruby Users Group.
• In blue are the people that I work with.
• In green are the people that I know through my time spent helping with the Guild Wars Wiki.
• In grey are people that don't fall into any of the other groups!

At the top of the retweets is @saveourforests. This is actually an account I registered myself during my time assisting in the Save Our Forests campaign while at the Forestry Commission, so there is a little bit of self-promotion going on here, but since its creation the account has been updated almost exclusively by Tony, a former colleague, so I don't feel too guilty! And it was (and is) for a good cause!

Following on from that there's a good mix of people from ScotRUG and work who tend to say amusing or interesting things, and of course my girlfriend Lindsey, aka @Daily_Madness, who I am obliged to retweet from time to time to stay in her good books ;)

My @notch retweets are due to my recent Minecraft addiction. The less said about that the better.

Mentions

Mentions are more varied than retweets, probably because I'm more likely to have a conversation with most people than retweet them.

My colleagues @mungler and @mr_urf top the mentions chart, followed almost exclusively by members of ScotRUG and the Guild Wars Wiki, the only notable exceptions being my friend @mikos who is not a ruby developer (shock horror) and @Daily_Madness.

Hashtags

I feel like I have to mention hashtags since they're an important part of Twitter, but it would be pointless creating a chart for them since I only tend to use them as jokes.

The only two that I seem to have used seriously are #yaypril 3 times and #scotruby 7 times.

Language

My most used word is "I". I'm so egocentric. This hasn't changed from last year.

But short words aren't very interesting, so instead I examined my most used longer-than-four-letter words:

My most used words actually seem really positive! In fact you can almost read that last chart as a sentence.

I tend to say thanks a lot in real life, but I didn't realise this had carried over into Twitter.

I also probably say "awesome" a little too much. I am trying to replace this with "splendid".

Summary

I'm not sure if analysing my tweets is a normal thing to do. I'm pretty certain it isn't. But it's quite fun to look closely at something that you've been doing almost absent-mindedly – like reading too much into people's doodles or trying to predict the future by examining the remnants of a cup of tea.

Thank you to my Twitter followers/followees for a year full of :), here's hoping for another 2,048 mostly happy tweets!