eMetrics wrapped up earlier this week after 4 days of fun - of which I was only there for one day. Knowing that I would only be there for one day I set up a Twitter backchannel on Twemes.com. I’d seen Twitter used quite effectively at Media Re:Public and, of course, heard about its use at SXSW. Of course, since we’re analysts can’t do something new without some gratuitous analysis!

This chart shows the incremental contribution - on a percentage basis - of each Twitterer who participated during eMetrics. Note that I have removed myself ("Omomyid") from the data as I was the host and my behavior could be considered to skew the data.

As you can see, Bob Page was the top TwIt with 25.6% (53) of all Tweets - way to go Bob!

There’s quite a large gap between Bob and the second rated TwIt - June Dershewitz who contributed 11.1% (23) of all Tweets. June was followed closely by Marshall Sponder at 10.1% (21).

There’s another small break in contribution and we get to Dave Rohrer and Eric T. Peterson who contributed 8.7 and 7.7% respectively.

Next, we have Vannesa Fox and Dean Burris adding 5.3% and 4.8%.

Finally, we have Rene Dechamps and Gradiva Couzin chipping in another 3.9% and 3.4% of Tweets and that gets us to 80.7% of all Tweets being driven by 9 individuals (36% of active #eMetrics twitterers.)

Here’s another take on the same data … basically just a chart of the raw counts. In this case it’s a little easier to see how more active Bob was than everyone else and the relative groups that were discussed above.

In addition a more striking grouping is visible in this chart:

1. Uber-Twitterers - From Bob Page to Eric T. Peterson, this group is responsible for 131 tweets covering 63.3% of all tweets. This group averaged 26 tweets per person, 17.9 per day and almost 3.3 tweets per person per day.

2. Engaged Twitterers - from Vanessa Fox to Jim Sterne, this group tweeted 43 times and contibuted 20.8% of the tweets. This group averaged 8.6 tweets per person 5.4 tweets per day and 1.1 per day

3. Casual Twitterers - this group, from Laura Forrest to Ian Thomas had 19 total tweets in 8 days. They averaged 3.8 per person, 2.4 tweets per day and 0.5 tweets per person per day. Casual Twitterers contributed 9.2% of tweets.

4. Sometime Twitterers - from u_m to Phil Sheard this group had a total of 8 tweets which works out to 2 per person and 1 per day. They contributed 3.9% to the twitter-stream.

5. One-Tweet Wonders - this is the largest group with 6 members each had just one tweet to #emetrics (2.9% of total) in the 8 days between May 1 and May 8, 2008.

So what’s all this telling us? Well, I’m not sure beyond the fact that there were discreet and obvious levels of engagement in the back channel.

I haven’t done a qualitative assessment of the tweets themselves - sure would to love to see that. But my general sense is that this backchannel was used more for status and social communication (e.g. ‘I’m at the lobby bar’) than as an idea space like I saw at Media Re:Public.

John Peltier (See Comments) gives us this Zipf test chart on the distribution of tweets:

I’ll be at eMetrics on Sunday and Monday next week and I think I’ll follow Jeremiah’s lead and not load up on gear. The iphone and a power cord should do it. I won’t live blog - I’ll live Tweet instead. I won’t be in the sessions but you can find me in the halls.

I’ve been on Twitter for quite a while but never found much value beyond the amusement and entertainment until I went to Media Re:Public where I and a bunch of others were tweeting tidbits from the sessions. Turned out to be a great and fun way to get a sense of all that was happening.

There are lots of tools that you can use to keep track of Twitter but my current favorite is Twemes.com - you can see their widget at the right with the emetrics tweme (Twitter-meme). Mostly because it’s using the same idea that I had back in November ‘07 - although I can’t take credit for the idea it is still cool.

So, IF you are going to be at eMetrics in San Francisco next week AND you’re on Twitter (if you’re not - why not?) then use #emetrics whenever you tweet about the event and you can keep track of it (live even) at twemes.com/emetrics or grab the RSS feed for your reader, whatever you want.

We can share ideas/thoughts/opinions of the event that way (the discussion can get pretty lively) and those not fortunate enough to be at Emetrics can read about what’s going on…

June Dershewitz saw my Tweet and has on-boarded the idea.

Also joining in so far are:

• Bob Page
• Jim Sterne (!)
• Julien Coquet
• René Dechamps

So what about it? Will you play the Tweme game too? Leave a comment or tweet me with your thoughts!

First of all, thank you to Avinash and the rest of the Google Analytics team for getting me into the new version of G.A. while I was at Emetrics. Avinash, in particular seemed interested in my comments on the new visualizations, so without further ado, here is some feedback for the team.

I’d really love to start off by talking about the addition of sparklines, but I just can’t because I am too distracted by the big trend chart.

Here’s what that looks like:

Let’s take a quick moment to compare that to a Google Finance chart:

Notice that they are both ‘web 2.0-ey’ and ‘ajaxey’. However, the GA chart seems to have gone a little over the top with the very thick trend line and large diameter data point markers.

It’s worth noting that the Google Finance chart offers multiple ways to traverse (interact) with this data. I can both traverse and zoom (or unzoom) the chart at the bottom as well as zoom the chart from the top-left text links. In the GA chart my only option for interacting with the data is through the pull down menus at the top right (one for date(s) and one for dimension which are kind of kludgey if you ask me - they don’t respond -hhmmm- smoothly and they rearrange the page whereas the controls in the GF charts don’t require the page to be reordered and react both quickly and smoothly.

None of these are my biggest criticism, the simple fact is that the GA chart with the heavy line and large radius markers makes me feel like it’s a kid’s chart, that is a chart designed for a kid.

I find it very odd that the GA Dashboard chart is liquid - that is it stretches to fit the browser width. This changes the horizontal scale of the chart and can either obscure important trend details or create artifacts in the visualization - a fixed width chart that is appropriately scaled would be better.

Maybe it’s just me but I actually feel patronized by the Google Analytics chart like I’m so clueless that I wouldn’t notice the trends or the data points if they weren’t pessimistically obvious. I *think* that I actually like the roll-over data labels because it puts the detailed data into the chart as opposed to how the GF chart updates the information way up in the right hand corner is you hover over the map. But, again the heavy black border just screams ‘MAKE SURE YOU LOOK AT ME AND IF YOU DON’T THEN YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON HERE!’.

It’s not that I’m totally in love with the GF charts, as noted above I’d really like to see the detail data down next to the chart in a data label and while I theoretically like the idea of marking key news events on the chart, the implementation can get quite messy and distracting. Unfortunately I don’t have a good solution in mind yet but I’d really like to see it cleaned up.

For the GA chart, I’d recommend:

1. Don’t talk down to the user, move towards a more elegant presentation like that of Google Finance
2. Build in interactive controls like the ones used in GF
3. Make the chart fixed-width, in this case liquidity is bad
4. Potentially allow for multiple dimensions to be charted (within reason)

Ok, that’s enough about the dashboard chart, sparklines will have to wait for another day.

By the way, overall I like the redesign of GA - for me it is generally more intuitive to navigate and use.

I’d love to hear what you think…

Like so many other in our clique, I’m heading to San Fran for Emetrics.
I’ll be at the WAA General Meeting and Reception Sunday evening and at the event Monday - Wednesday.

This will be my second year at Emetrics, but unfortunately I am not speaking this time (or perhaps fortunately for those who remember my session from last year).