I launched the bot during the first week of January this year.  Actually, it was a few days before the Miracle on the Hudson event.  So, I decided to hold off on the marketing.

I was marketing the bot to those I though would find it useful.  I would keep a search column open for “flight status” on Tweetdeck and when a tweet matched, I would review and send a reply if it made sense.  This was simple, easy and non-intrusive.  But I knew it wasn’t going to garner the followers to make it into a successful product.

On Monday Feb. 9, a tweet went out from @mashable linking to a post by @iElliott on productivity with twitter.
Update: I did not approach @mashable or @iElliott for a plug.  I assume they found it to be useful and wanted to share it with their readers.

@mashable tweet

This started the flow of followers.  Before the tweet, there were about 12 followers; 24 hours later, 270.  It was mad rush in the first few hours and has slowed to a trickle now.  (I will see if can plot the follower flow) The majority of followers is in the US, which is good, cause the product mostly supports US and large international airlines.

map of @myflightinfo

Now the hard part of delivering what the followers want – a simple and useful product.

I have lots of ideas about how to make it better, but I’d like to incorporate what the users want.

If you have any comments/questions/suggestions please send to @myflightinfo or to me at my personal account @lmai

Don’t forget to check your flight status with @myflightinfo !!
You can get your own map of followers at http://www.ironmonkeyventures.com/mapmytweeps

My favorite quote:

“And thus, I learned the final lesson of SEO: Patience is required.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123379331364449967.html?mod=rss_whats_news_technology
The murky art of search-engine optimization can surface a person’s better side online with the proper techno-aggrandizing.

Twitter has become a social bookmarking/discovery tool for me.  I really on all my friends to let me know what they find interesting.  I needed a simple way to see what new links are out there.

TweetLnks.com started as a personal project to look at all the links in my twitter feed.  Then @ceonyc asked if anyone knew of such a tool.  So a little sprucing up and some additional functionality and it’s ready for public use.  I’ll visit this webapp after a period of not using twitter to see what kind of links are interesting.

TweetLnks.com analyzes the tweets of your friends to see what URLs your friends are talking about.  In my network of friends, 4 tweets were made about the CNBC boycott.

Give it a try and let me know your thoughts @lmai

 

Screenshot of Tweetlnks.com

So I wrote this twitter bot that will reply with my flight status.
It’s fast, free, and simple.

1.  Follow @myflightinfo and wait for a follow back.
2.  Send your flight information in a message.  Like this “d myflightinfo co101″.
3.  Within a minute, you should get a direct message back with your status.

The data comes from Flightstats.com

Here is my first rendering of my Twitter network.  It maps my first 100 followers, for each of my followers it maps 3 of their followers, and then one more iteration.  The size and complexity grow too quickly for me to get any useful information.  Plus it takes forever.

I think I’m going about this the wrong way.  I need a question or a hypothesis and then see if I can answer using social network mapping.

]]> http://www.ironmonkeyventures.com/blog/2009/01/the-next-iteration-of-network-mapping/feed/ 0 http://www.ironmonkeyventures.com/blog/2009/01/mapmytweeps-version-02/ http://www.ironmonkeyventures.com/blog/2009/01/mapmytweeps-version-02/#comments Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:54:17 +0000 Larry http://www.ironmonkeyventures.com/blog/?p=176 I halved the average load time by using multi curl to pull data.  10 seconds for the first time user instead of over 20.
I’m satisfied for today.

Both @StockTwits and @Shakeshack auto-follow, so it’s a good example of the mapping of their respective followers.

@stocktwits - strong US following, especially along the East Coast and a good showing in Europe.

@shakeshack – very similar to @stocktwits in the US and Europe, non in South America but 3 in Australia.

I will revisit these maps in 1 months time to see the differences.

Map your twitter following and friends at http://www.ironmonkeyventures.com/mashup/mapmytweeps.php

Check out the map of my tweeps.

I’m very concentrated in the US as you can see.
The next photo shows more detail of my follwers and the people I follow.

There’s obvious concentration on the East and West coasts, but there’s an interesting bunching in the Atlanta, Georgia area.

Map your following or friends at http://www.ironmonkeyventures.com/mashup/mapmytweeps.php

I finally found this Yahoo Pipe by Andy M called Twitter Friends, but it wasn’t everything I was looking for.

I wanted to combine both on a single map with different colors and also show mutual following relationships.  Google maps provided that flexibility.

Check it out and let me know your thoughts.

MapMyTweeps

Feel free to share them with me.  I would love to see some interesting maps from brands.  You can email them to me at info at ironmonkeyventures.com

http://mycorporation.com/freeday/?cid=web_intuit_hp_hero_ffad