Damon Cortesi's Blog

I get very bent out-of-shape when people post inaccurate or misleading statistics. TechCrunch just recently had a post on the Top 20 Twitter Applications in which they used traffic to the applications’ web sites to determine the top 20 apps. While they admit it’s not the best, they left out one of the top Twitter clients (which didn’t make Loic happy, of course) and the data really is not representative of the truth.

As part of TweetStats, I pull in data from Gnip on every single Twitter update and the associated application. So, here are the real Top 20 Twitter applications.

Footnote: This is out of slightly over 50 million Twitter updates in January. It does not included protected users and there may be some tweets missing due to downtime in Twitter or Gnip. But for the most part, this is very representative.

Update: Another quick stat – in January, 1,231 different client applications were used to post updates to Twitter.

Several years ago, when I was in high school, my father gave me several … motivational quotes. I recall building a desk with him in my bedroom out of an old door. Six feet long, it was an area where I could spread out and both study, as well as work on my computer. On top of the desk was a sheet of glass, underneath which were these various quotes. I don’t recall if I put them there or he did, but these water-stained, sun-faded pieces of paper hang in my kitchen to this very day.

I didn’t realize it then, but these simple pieces of paper would impact how I approached life for the next decade and beyond. These simple reminders, looking up at me while I would be studying, constantly reminded me that life is what we make of it. In most cases, if we work hard and put effort into our lives, we are rewarded in kind. I saw a quotation from Michael Jordan this evening, and it reminded me of one of my favorite pieces. Like many kids, I was a fan of Jordan growing up. This quotation is attributed to him:

“I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.”

Similarly, my father provided me with the following piece from Charles Swindoll:

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life.

Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company… a church… a home.

The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past… we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude… I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it.

And so it is with you… we are in charge of our attitudes.

What were the other pieces, you ask?

“If”, by Rudyard Kipling was one.
The other was about avoiding energy vampires. Accompanied by the Swindoll piece, it mentioned:

1. Out attitude at the beginning of any task determines its success or failure.
2. The mind carries only one thought at a time – so make it positive, not negative.
3. Our attitude towards life determines life’s attitude toward us
4. Human beings want to be appreciated – needed. Give this appreciation and it will be returned to you.
5. Look for the best in others. You can learn something from everyone.
6. Don’t talk about personal problems, bad luck, or poor state-of-health – no one else is interested
7. Radiate the attitude of well being, confidence, and enthusiasm – others will follow your lead.
8. Success or failure in anything is caused more by MENTAL ATTITUDE than by mental capacity.
9. Become the kind of individual you want to be. Remember – you are what you think…YOU ARE!

Thanks, Dad. I wouldn’t be who and where I am today without you. You have given me both the work ethic and the attitude necessary to succeed.

Approximately 17 hours ago, I received a tweet from @KymPossible regarding an app to pull your Twitpics out of your timeline. Apparently, @donttrythis wanted to pull all of his TwitPics out of his Twitter timeline. Always one for a challenge and with a fond love of one-liners, I whipped up this quick hack that pulls TwitPics out of your Twitter timeline and sticks them in an HTML file.

It’s ugly, it can be factored, it’s invalid HTML and the API barfs more often than returning the correct data…but it works. For the sake of sharing, here’s the little “script”.

That will download the last 750 updates (the Twitter API barfed over that number usually), run some shell-fu (this is where the factoring would come in), retrieve the twitpic images and sort them in chronological order. It should work on most UNIX-based systems, but I wrote it on OS X. Have a nice day.

(I really need to make a new post on my other new Twitter tool that can be used to search Twitter bios. I’ll get to that soon…)

p.s. I love Gist.