I’ve been talking to Damon P. Cortesi about his TweetStats app. Great graphs of your twitter usage, or any other user. (one of the best looking Twitter related sites I’ve seen, fun and useful)

Damon agreed to an interview for the Twitter Handbook.. here it is:

How did you get started using Twitter?

I first signed up in December of 2006 and then my account lay dormant until May of ‘07 when I got a few friends on it. We’re geographically spread out, but would share our daily activities and it was really nice to be able to keep up with my friends. When Twitter introduced the “tracking” feature, my usage skyrocketed as it much easier to find people interested in the same things I was.

What motivated you to create an TweetStat?

I was just about to post my 2000th update and was curious how I had been using Twitter over that time and who I had been talking to. A couple hours and a perl script later, I had some charts that displayed my usage. Once I posted a screenshot of that, I found that others were interested in quantifying their Twitter usage but the script I released was limited to those familiar with perl on OS X with iWork Numbers. I took the opportunity to learn Ruby on Rails and make a web service that everybody could use.

What results have you seen from twitter use (and the app)?

Twitter has expanded my social circle, introducing me to people not only in my hometown of Seattle, but also across the world. For example, I met up with a fellow Twitterite in Amsterdam when I was there for a conference. We had never met in person before, but organized via Twitter, had a couple beers and some interesting conversation. It also allows me to keep in touch with my good friends in a way I hadn’t been able to previously – I’m horrible at keeping in touch. I think TweetStats introduced me to a number of people I wouldn’t have met otherwise. Much to the chagrin of some of my followers who are close friends in real life, I then started tweeting like crazy.

What’s planned for the future.
I hope to continue to provide even more useful information with TweetStats. Right now it’s a site that’s kind of fun, but is definitely lacking a definitive usefulness. While it’s great to be able to quantify your Twitter activity, I’d really love to dig into the data and provide some practical information to help people analyze their Twitter community in addition to their own activity. Unfortunately, as it’s merely a side project for me and as such, new features are generally slow to roll out.

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