twitarian

Author: Bryan Cattle @bcattle

Your twitter librarian. Calculates some (possibly) useful metrics.

What does it do?

This app pulls your tweets and the tweets of people who have mentioned you, over a time interval that you specify. It dumps this data into Excel, and calculates some metrics for you, like

• Number of re-tweets
• Number of favorites
• Number of times others mentioned you
• Your most-popular tweets
• Who talks about you the most
• A measurement of your "Engagement"

The app generates an Excel 2007 file

How to use on Windows

1. Download the latest release of the program from this page. Click the green button to get Windows binaries.

2. Save the zip file somewhere and open it

3. Go in the dist/ folder and run twitarian.exe. You should see:

Begin by entering your username.

Next, you need to tell the app how far back to analyze. If you have a lot of tweets, it can be slow to process them all. The app guesses that you might want to do a quarterly tally, and offers a suggested date. You can override it with a date of your choice, or just hit Enter for the default.

Now you need to tell the app how to access your Twitter account. The app needs to do this because only you are allowed to see a list of who has mentioned you.

As you can see, it is waiting for you to enter a PIN. The way this works is that you need to give Twitarian permission to access Twitter on your behalf. The way you do this is by visiting a page on twitter.com in your web browser and getting a PIN that lets the app to access your tweets.

IMPORTANT: The account you authorize with Twitter must be the same account you entered into Twitarian when it asked for your username. Otherwise the app won't know on whose behalf it should be working!

The app should also open a web browser with this screen:

Click "Authorize" and you should see

Go back to the command prompt and type this code in. Press Enter, and presto! the app should run:

Once the app is done, it will tell you the name of the file where it saved the results:

To open the file in Excel, press Enter, otherwise press any other key to quit.

Happy tweeting!

Uh oh, something went wrong

You may get the bogus error that "MSVCR90.dll is Missing or Not Found". If you do, you need to install a small library from Microsoft. Download and run the installer here.

How to use on a Mac

Go to the releases page. Don't download the binaries, download the source code tar.gz. Open a command prompt and unzip

% tar -zxvf 1.0.0.tar.gz

Install the needed libraries with

% sudo pip install -r requirements.txt

Then, simply run the script

% python twitarian.py

After that, the process is the same as above. Enter username, enter date of interest, authorize... and profit.