Teach Me My Ways

My favorite thing about software is when it teaches me something about myself that I didn’t know. That something doesn’t need to be important, it just needs to be something. I’m a huge fan of twitter so I was pretty excited when I came across this twitter mashup. It uses Yahoo Pipes (to parse data client side) and Google Charts (to present data) to show you a scatter chart of when you typically tweet and bar charts of your tweets by month, day of week and hour.

It’s a really interesting representation of my twitter activity and technologically it is a sweet use of both Yahoo and Google tools. So what did those charts teach me? Simple: I tweet most between 8 and 10PM on Wednesday and Thursday. I find that interesting. Also, Saturday around 2PM seems to be popular for whatever reason.

I write all this for one reason. The next app that you build, think about this. Think about how you can use the data that your users are entering to teach them something about themselves. It can be something silly, like when they tweet the most, or something more profound that they would have never noticed without your help. Every time someone clicks or types in your app, it’s a chance for you to collect data and teach the user something about themselves or teach you something about how they are using your app. Don’t just build something to collect data. Build something that learns what your users are doing and adds value to their lives.

Some Related Links

• Google Web History - what months, days and such you search the most on, what terms you search for the most, suggests searches you might be interested in based on your habits
• Google Reader Trends - shows you which days you read feeds on, which feeds post the most items, which feeds you read the most or the least, etc.
• Flickr Stats - stats on your photos views, but also on which photos you’ve tagged, put in sets, etc.
• Last.fm - shows you what music you listen to and suggests stuff you might like