Its been a year since I launched @tweet4blood with VSR‘s help. It’s not a great geek work, it’s a simple two page application based on twitter api. It didn’t take more than an hour to design and code the app. But for me its been one of the happiest moment as I was trying to use technology and social media in use.

Ever since I launched it, I have been thinking about its success. Is it number of page views? or news paper coverages? or is the number blood requests? But then I thought number of blood donations made due to tweet4blood is the right measure. Even though I couldn’t track it properly, followers of tweet for blood were very kind to send some responses. I am pasting two such mails verbatim here.

1. First Response
“I am a regular blood donor. I always look for opportunities to donate blood the moment three months pass since my last donation. I have registered with multiple blood banks and websites to alert me whenever they need blood of my type in the vicinity. But such systems have turned passive and I started visiting blood banks to donate blood instead of donating it for a person who is in immediate need, admitted in a hospital.

Few months back I came to know about tweet4blood. It is the twitter way of spreading the message for any blood requirements. Since people tweet with blood type, location and phone number, it becomes easy for me to get in touch with the patient and do my best. Earlier, I remember, I used to receive bulk mails for blood donation requests. But things such as tweet4blood have made things easier. My only concern is, India’s poor, who are not exposed to communication channels like emails are twitters may be suffering. We need to address this concern.
- @sharadaprasad
”

2. Second response
“Social networking is a lot of hype and little substance. It is difficult to find a functional application of a social networking platform that does not include a heavy dose of self-aggrandizement. @tweet4blood on Twitter stands-out as an exception. It is functional and practical.

How have I used it?
- As a donor, on three separate occasions I have called a mobile number that was RT’d by @tweet4blood
- On all three occasions I was late, despite calling within a few minutes of receiving the tweet!!
- In other words, the person who answered, said the equivalent of “I appreciate the call. We are covered. We have been flooded with calls from donors.”

I rest my case!
- @anand_bala”

I know it’s not a popular site but I think even if it has helped at least one on this planet earth. It’s successful. What do you think?

There are both positives and negatives being on twitter. I get to share interesting stuff, like live pictures, articles, posts, ideas, travel experience etc. I also get to read. I have got so many great answers to my questions, that i reach to a twitter client as soon as I have a question. Its special while traveling as you get answers in real time. I have also tried to help people. Twitter is the new **water cooler**. Yes I use it to track my boss too :)

On the negative side anybody can easily track me easily. There is information overload. You really can not keep up with everybody as you start following more and more people. And last but not the least tweeting when I am angry

The positives have been so overwhelming that I don’t consider negatives as negatives except point #3. So now, I have a rule. Don’t tweet when you are angry. I give two thinkings before I tweet anything negative. Since tweeting is easy, we generally tend to judge everything in 140 seconds. Twitter has bigger effect (as much as a blog post if not more), so we need to responsible before we comment on anything. I must agree those #fail tags have helped me many times but I personally think twice before I tag anything #fail. So do I moderate my tweets? Yes, I do.

Do you moderate your own tweets? In what scenarios?

According to this post by TechCrunch about 9.7% of traffic is driven to TechCrunch is by twitter. This makes a twitter third biggest traffic source. After reading that post, I started wondering about my own blog.

In last few months I had not digged much into analytics. Today I logged into account to check the traffic sources to my site.

No wonder Google stands in the first position. Direct visitors take the second position. Surprise, Surprise Twitter takes the third position. It proves how big twitter has grown as a traffic driver. No wonder everybody is on twitter from NYtimes to bangaloremirror. My guess is very soon it will surpass digg and stumbleupon. So if you are a blogger, twitter can become prime source of traffic. Go create an account and don’t forget to follow me @thej :)

Amongst just the referral sites Twitter stands first.
Though I am not sure how Google Images is sending users to my site. (Who the heck is searching for my pictures?)

Of course the other biggest source of traffic is through feedreaders. It looks like Google Reader is the most famous feed reader. Another surprising factor here is the rise of Outlook 2007 as feed reader.

I have been using Outlook 2007 to read feed for some time now. I must say I am happy with it. You should use it only to subscribe to the most important blogs/newsites. For the rest continue using GReader.

In all I must concentrate on twitter and outlook readers in future to get more traffic.

BTW how did you arrive here?

After looking at Dave Winer’s Top 40 links on twitter app, I wrote my own version of it called TopLinks

It displays the the top links (sorted by number of visits, like digg) shared by me on twitter in last 400 tweets. Its been scheduled to run once every hour.The logic is little different from Dave’s app. He displays latest top 40 links. Since I am not a big link sharer, I choose to display all of them present in my last 400 tweets.

The app uses twitter and bitly APIs. I want to release the code, but I hacked it in 2 hrs, so its not very pretty. Let me clean it before releasing it .

What next? May be a wordpress plugin to show your top links on twitter. Any other ideas?

BTW I am @thej on twitter.

Update: Opensourced

Its a mosaic of all my twitter followers (48pxx48px) profile pictures. Its a long post to be completely displayed on front page. So click on the link.
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