retweetrank

Twitter has become a powerful medium for viral marketing and bringing traffic to a website. My hack: retweetrank, went viral all due to twitter. Tweets by Robert Scoble, Tim O’Reilly, Guy Kawasaki and tons of others (600+) made it easy for retweetrank to cross 30,000 users within 10 days.

One of the notable thing was the spike in site traffic after Scobleizer tweeted the link. Below is the graph showing requests/sec.

Here I coin (:P) a term: “Scobleizer effect“:

“Scobleizer effect is the phenomenon of a popular twitter user tweeting a link of a smaller site, causing a sudden enormous spike in the site traffic. The link spreads rapidly with several users retweeting the same and results in more small traffic spikes.”

Thanks to appengine, I need not worry about scaling.

Obama is the most followed twitter user, but who is producing the most interesting content across the twittersphere lately?

Retweets are great indication of the originator’s topical influence and the audience’s interest. Recently, after reading a post “Are You Retweetable“, from Todd Sampson (co-founder MyBlogLog), I thought of creating a quick hack, Retweetrank, for ranking twitter users based on the number of retweets.

Retweetrank lets you find rank of any twitter user. With the rank, latest retweets of the user are shown and an RSS feed can also be grabbed for the same. Monitoring retweets can provide a better understanding of audience to the originator while others can see the most interesting tweets of a user.

The top ranked twitter users, who have been most retweeted recently, are listed in the leaderboard. They are the once producing most interesting content across the twittersphere.

Find your retweet rank now.

Retweetrank searches the public timelines of twitter users through the twitter APIs and is deployed on google appengine.

Update (Jan 11): As Ian Kennedy suggested below in the comments, here is a greasemonkey script to see recent retweets for any user in the twitter sidebar.