Twitter referrals in Google Analytics

Twitter has its own short url for tweets, which will show up in Google Analytics reports as referrer starting with http://t.co

To trace back to the tweet we can use Twitter's search with the url as the search term.

I recently tweeted a link to a blog post, and sure enough the subsequent day included a referrer from a URL below http://t.co

The search result can be seen from:

https://twitter.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2FcqWPRVyJ9l

Chances are that this will stop working by the time you get around to reading this, as the search time range is rather limited (a few days?)

How the Internet is transforming the way we watch television

I find it interesting that two of my favourite Internet based technologies are having opposing effects on the way that I watch TV programmes.

BBC iPlayer and its contemporaries allow me to download or stream movies, comedy shows, etc. to watch whenever I want.

Twitter allows people to share their views on what is currently being broadcast basically in realtime.

Analysing social networks and recommendations

In an earlier post I mentioned that I have been playing around with the Youtube API to see how to find out how videos might be connected.

I have been able to find music videos related to each other within 5 or 6 levels of suggested videos.  Strangely my own videos on my Youtube channel don't show as being related.

The first simple, obvious optimisation that I included in the Youtube network path search was to not look up suggestions for videos that had already been checked.  Out of interest I kept a record of these duplicate suggestions and noticed that the percentage seemed quite high.  Now I am a little curious about how common duplicates are in other types of networks.

Twitter is the obvious candidate for exploring social networks, as most things are public and there is a simple RESTful API to navigate.

I may need to set up some rules to recognise someone as a celebrity or promotional / marketing account if they have a very high number of followers, likewise I could treat someone as a spammer if they follow an exorbitant number of accounts.

If I'm feeling particularly motivated to apply what I've been learning about recently, I could even import the data into a MongoDB database, set up some indexes and run some queries.  (The prevalence of JSON formatting in these platforms makes this easier than you might think).

A spontaneous Twitter thought

I wonder how long it will take for world records to start related to Twitter?

e.g. the most retweeted tweet.

I'm mildly curious about seeing some visualisations of patterns of activity in the twitterverse. So far I'd expect Michael Jackson's death to have been the most significant world event since Twitter has been in the mainstream.

It's a numbers game - Java developer interviews

Today I heard that I was definitely the second choice, out of the final four candidates that were interviewed for a Java developer role last week. I hadn't been pressuring the agent for feedback, and he was quite keen on emphasizing that the company will be looking to grow further in the coming months - hopefully I won't still be available then.

On Wednesday morning I have my first face-to-face interview with another company who interviewed me by phone last Monday. After the phone interview they had another eight or nine candidates to speak to, so I've already made it to the final three.

Unrelated to the job interviews, I've started noticing that some of the people that are following me on Twitter don't appear to be interested in the topics that I am tweating about. If I see that they are following more than three times the number of people who are following them, then it reinforces my theory that they are just trying to increase their popularity for no good reason - so I block them.