At the close of 2007, Damon Cortesi became curious about his own Twitter usage and released a little perl script that would scrape and digest Twitter usage statistics for a given account. About a month later, Damon used TwitterStats to power a learn-a-new-coding-language project with Ruby On Rails that becameTweetStats.

I ran the Makice family accounts through the TweetStats machine to visualize our history, which began shortly before the coming out party for Twitter as a social network at South by Southwest Conference in March 2007. Amy and I first used Twitter to keep each other connected during spring break when I was in Bloomington while she took the kids to Florida. For a while, that was the peak of Amy’s usage. It changed when she started using Twitterrific and following some locals. Now that she is using it with a new purpose ("Home Tweet Homeschool"), it will be interesting to see if her January jump in tweet publication continues through the spring.

Another interesting insight—one that should be old news to anyone who knows me—is how the hourly charts match up. For six hours between midnight and dawn, Amy is almost completely dormant. Any time she spends conscious during that time is typically reserved for mild insomnia and needy kids. For myself, I have a spike in activity just as she is winding down for the night, followed by a low but steady murmur throughout the night. This reflects not only a general lack of sleep but also irregular sleeping patterns (sometimes I stay up late, sometimes I get up early). It makes me wonder if Twitter could reveal patterns in couples’ use of Internet technologies.

Kevin’s Tweet history:

Amy’s Tweet history:

NOTE: There was a small bug related to the Valentine’s Day emoticon hearts (<3). Twitter added a little incentive to use those characters, creating a minor coding issues. if you give it a go and it doesn’t match what you know about your own usage, it might be worth a scan of your February 14th tweets for those characters.