Happy Earth Day! But more importantly, happy One Year Of Tom Henrich On Twitter Day!

Yep. As far as I can tell, my first post to Twitter under my @tomhenrich account was one year ago today – April 22nd, 2010. From what various online tools can dig up, I created the account in early-ish 2008 but didn’t post much of anything. I’m also not sure that my first actual tweet was on April 22nd, since the account was originally “thenrich” (which is now taken by someone else) but switched to “tomhenrich” at some point, and Twitter’s search fails to discover anything past that switch.

And really, even that’s not my first post to Twitter ever. Don’t think I was just crazy-late to the Twitter party – I’d been on Twitter under a different username (one I’d been using in college) since early 2007. I’d racked up a few thousand tweets, but since I was still in that phase of internet usage where my real name was completely disconnected from my online name, it didn’t feel like there was any real connection between me and those I was following and being followed by. It was time to take responsibility for my content and be myself.

So thus was born my @tomhenrich account. On this, the apparent one-year anniversary of my real-name account, I thought it’d be interesting to look at how the year’s gone by.

Big Picture

As of the writing of this post, on April 22nd, 2011, I’ve posted 8,557 tweets, totalling about 840,000 characters. 402 of those tweets used the full 140 characters. If you assume a rough average of maybe 30 seconds taken to post a tweet, that comes out to just barely shy of three full days’ worth of time spent tweeting.

I’m currently following 343 users and counting, and there are 502 users that deemed me worthy of being followed (some of which are inevitably spam that I didn’t get around to reporting).

When did I have time to post all that?

I started tweeting in late April, and picked up speed pretty quickly.

By early December 2010, it started to feel like I was tweeting excessively, and decided to cut back, hence the decline after that point. March was higher due to my SXSW attendance, but otherwise I’ve managed to reduce my daily output and improve my signal-to-noise ratio a bit.

Most of my tweets are spread pretty evenly across weekdays. There’s a noticeable drop on weekends as you’d expect, and Tuesdays are just a little higher for some reason that escapes me. (Graph for this one is pretty boringly even, so I’ve spared you.)

I’m clearly no longer the night owl I used to be in college, at least as far as Twitter usage goes. My Twitter activity is mostly focused during the workday hours, with a surge in the afternoon but then dying off almost completely by around 9pm on average. From midnight to 6am, nary a word is heard from me online. (Hopefully I’m sleeping, but it’s also just as likely I’m head down in some code and can’t be bothered to look at Twitter.)

Okay, but what is all this activity for?

Fair question. Graphs of Twitter activity don’t mean much if you’re just shouting into the void. About 36% of my tweets are replies to other users; 20% of my activity is retweeting other people’s content.

That leaves about 44% as “original content” – my own material. Me posting random thoughts, quips, whatever crosses my mind that I deemed necessary to share with the world (or at least the suckers following me).

PeerIndex offers analysis of what they call your “social capital,” and shows you what exactly you’re tweeting about. According to their graph, my tweets are spread relatively evenly across topics like arts & media (AME), technology (TEC), and lifestyle (LIF). As should be obvious to anyone who knows me, there’s very little activity for sports-related topics (SPO), and very little for health/medical topics (MED). What few sports-related tweets they may have picked up on were probably snarky comments, especially around the time of the Superbowl (when my home state’s Green Bay Packers were playing, and thus everyone I know was going absolutely nuts).

This confirms for me that my focus on tech-related topics is dominant, which is what I want. My goal is to continue this trend and post mostly on mobile tech, the web, development, etc.

My most commonly-used hashtags? #SXSW was by far the top tag; being at such a huge tech conference for a week will do that. Next up was #devmke, since I’ve done what I can to connect with the local Milwaukee developer community (who are great people, by the way). Other tags of interest: the #wiunion protests and their coverage were pretty hot topics for a while, as was the #brewcityflood; #hulksmash and #facepalm make a few appearances (both usually tied to #devmke); and I apparently have more than a few #firstworldproblems in my life. Who knew?

But who am I talking to? As in any community, there are people you end up gravitating around and interacting with the most. Twitter is no different. When I started my @tomhenrich account, I made it my goal to connect more with people in Milwaukee, to be actually social rather than just “social.” So far, it appears that’s working out as a good idea. Judging by the number of times I reply to or retweet them, these are my top ten Twitter connections: @ashedryden, @edcetera, @bananza, @joxiclepopsicle, @joshjs, @mathiasx, @thebestsophist, @raster, @sarasantiago, and @brennanmke. (Runners-up: @joshdean and @sawaboof.)

It’s worth noting that, with the current exception of @bananza (aka Annie), I’ve met all of these people in real life, when previously they were just strangers on the internet. Achievement unlocked! (Kids: It’s okay to meet strangers from the internet, really it is. Still not a good idea to take candy from strange men in vans.)

C’mon, let’s wrap this up.

So that’s that. I didn’t really have any grandiose purpose for this post, I just thought it’d be interesting to do a quick-ish summary of my past year of Twitter activity and behavior. All in all it’d been great – I’ve met some really great people and learned a lot of things. I’ve only posted about what I’m eating a few times, and have proven to myself that the internet can be a lot more fun if you’re willing to connect your real self to your digital self.

(P.S. Most of this introspection was made possible by the fact of me being a data geek, and having installed a tool called Tweetnest, which lets you back up your tweets to your own database. Having all my tweets locally saved made it quite easy to run some queries and do some parsing to get at all the info above.)