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!

Webmeme.In, an Indian technology news aggregator, is my brand new mashup built on top of Yahoo! BOSS. Its a meme, presenting you the hottest Indian tech stories that are buzzing on the web. Want to know more about a story? Just click on it and you will reach the source blog. Sidebar presents the most recent stories from Indian tech blogs. You can also search amongst the tech news right from the site. Try it now.

Most of the stories you see on Webmeme.In are from Indian blogs. At the same time, stories from the top international blogs related to Indian tech industry will also flow into Webmeme.In river. So, you will not miss if TechCrunch is talking something interesting about an Indian company.

Follow @webmeme (top stories) or @webmemeFH (Firehose: all posts) to receive new updates in twitter. You can also subscribe to the RSS feeds.

How it works?

• Data aggregation: I use YQL to aggregate and extract data from all the sources.
• Story selection/Ranking: Recent stories which are generating maximum conversation over the web are selected automatically using APIs including Y! BOSS site explorer, Google Trackbacks and the most important postrank API which tracks almost all of the social media including bookmarking sites, Twitter, Friendfeed, comments on the blog post, etc.
• Related Stories: Related stories are found through similarity calculated over several features like content, tags, links, etc and is easily accomplished using text mining methods present in BOSS Mashup framework.
• Search: Site restricted search powered by Y! BOSS.
• User Interface: YUI. Get your grids quickly through YUI Grid builder
  
• Hosting: Site runs on Google App Engine, my favorite hosting platform.

Have suggestions/questions/feedback? Drop a comment below or contact me.

One of the key problems that is prominent in these trending topics is low relevance as these systems do not consider user interests. Ramanand did a tweet yesterday, wishing for “Trending topics for people I follow” which encouraged me to do this hack:

Twitter Trends hack presents the trending topics in your friends’ stream on twitter. Wanna know why a topic is trending in your network? Just check out the recent hot tweets from your friends. It uses OAuth. No passwords required . IPL (A cricket league in India) is the buzzing topic in my friends’ stream right now. Find out what is hot for you: Try here.

It took me just a couple of hours to complete the hack, all because of simple Twitter APIs, Tweetapp framework and App Engine. OAuth integration was very easy with Tweetapp. The hack analyzes recent two hundred tweets from your friends, finds keywords out of the stream and those referenced with more frequency are trending topics for you.

This hack is just a proof of concept. It is no where close to a perfect personalized topic trends. In ideal world, I would like to build user interest profiles, consider demographics and accordingly show trends. But, it will no longer remain a hack then

Update (24th April): Twitter has re-enabled OAuth. Try out twitter trends now
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Update (22nd April): An OAuth security issue has been discovered and several OAuth services including twitter have disabled it temporarily. You cannot try the hack right now

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.

I was an intern at Webaroo, contributed to the personalization logic of its products, when they were under development.

SMS GupShup is mobile group SMS service that allows users to create mobile communities and broadcast messages to them, similar to twitter, but more like yahoo/google groups for mobile. Currently, GupShup sends SMS messages only to Indian mobile phone numbers. It is being used by over 300,000 publishers sending around 10M messages per day. SMS to mobile devices is one of the major costs for Webaroo.

Webaroo started with their product for offline browsing, which didn’t strike the market well, even after a couple of years of the launch. With Google gears competition, its life ahead, is even tougher. I think one of the reasons why webaroo couldn’t pick up is due to the focus on caching static content, while google gears, powered easy caching and sync of dynamic content. Remember The Milk and Google reader are my favorite apps which I use over google gears.

Earlier, Rakesh Mathur with other founders, sold Junglee to Amazon in 1998 for about $250 million. Junglee had Stanford professor Jeff Ullman on their board, who was also advising Google folks that time. Interestingly, after making a good money, Rakesh Mathur & team approached their friends Larry Page and Sergey Brin to acquire Google. But the deal could not happen as Sergey was looking for a ten digit price.

In case you haven’t noticed, twitter was down for more than a couple of hours, precisely from 22:12:15 (5 Apr) to 00:42:46 (6 Apr) PST.