Exactly one year ago today, I launched Retweet Rank. Just a weekend hack, but turned out to be a lot more useful service than what I expected. Retweet Rank was the first service to track retweets and measure influence of twitter users based on how frequently they are retweeted and continues to be a favorite place on the web.

The traffic numbers are not bad. To date, retweet ranks of 760,000 users have been looked up. Every month, thousands of users tweet their rank and over 50,000 unique users visit the site.

Things which delighted me the most were tiny mentions of the service from folks like Evan Williams, Robert Scoble, Tim O’Reilly, Guy Kawasaki, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and many more. It also got highlighted in five books, including a bestseller, Web Analytics 2.0, by Avinash Kaushik.

Retweet Rank is a playground for me. I have been experimenting with SEO, placements, messaging, advertising, related users, etc. I will continue to do small changes to make the retweet tracking and quality measurement on twitter easier. It would be interesting to know what new you would like to see on Retweet Rank. If you have any thoughts, do leave your comments below.

Thank you all for the support and wish you a very Happy New year!

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.

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.