
57 YC startups' Twitter follower growth over time - shazow
http://socialgrapple.com/showcase/yc
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jellicle
I don't understand those charts at all. Some charts show growth (right side of
line is higher than left side of line) but the growth figure is negative. Some
charts show decline, but the growth figure is highly positive. I have no idea
what those charts are supposed to be illustrating - seems to be random noise.

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joelhaasnoot
And Dropbox is pretty much flat. I'm assuming that means data wasn't tracked
between 0 and the 200,000 members they now have.

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shazow
The data is only being displayed for the past 30 days. Keep in mind, just
because it's flat doesn't mean it's 0. It could be constant at a higher number
of growth. My apologies for not showing that effectively.

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camdykeman
Thanks for posting this. I've been trying to get an idea of just how
useful/helpful YC is in creating a successful company but evidence in of this
impact in terms of social media has been hard to come by. any other sources
you'd suggest?

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shazow
I guess it depends on how you define a successful company. In the capitalist
sense, something like <http://yclist.com/> is probably most poignant.

I wouldn't say that YC has a huge impact in terms of social media; they
definitely help with getting press mentions, but getting engaged subscribers
is really up to the founders.

Twitter is not relevant to all companies, but it's obvious that many are
leveraging it very effectively. I wonder if investors would be interested in a
dashboard like this for all their portfolio companies. The correlation to
"real growth" is probably small, but still better than nothing.

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shazow
Any corrections/requests welcome. If I'm missing anyone, I'll be adding new
accounts tomorrow, just toss them in this thread.

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tel
Pet peeve on sparklines: they're clean because they get rid of chartjunk, but
they're also pretty uninformative without context. Right now, they add almost
nothing to the presentation ("@dropbox hasn't changed <much> since <some time
ago>, but this other guy's popularity is <swinging wildly/pretty small and
noisy>").

Tufte originally intended them to be inserted into text and contextualized by
it. As an extension, he suggested adding small indicators of scale and
position as colored dots for example.

Either that or just lose them and graph the relative results of each of the
contenders. It all depends on what kind of story you want to tell.

Edit: just noticed that you mention that this information is tracked over the
last 30 days, but since that's not localized to the graphs, it's pretty easy
to not notice it.

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shazow
Fair point. I couldn't come up with a better way to display 57 charts on one
page which give some kind of interesting information without it being a total
mess.

The information is actually tracked indefinitely from when I started
monitoring it, and I have daily changes for more than 30 days for each of
these accounts at this point. I also have an interface for browsing each one
of them in a more granular fashion so that the chartjunk is visible (I can
give you access to this if you're interested). Here's Posterous for example:
<http://goo.gl/QSGp4>

Do you have any ideas for how to better present such a comparison between so
many data sources? Keeping in mind that scale varies hugely between the
smallest and largest.

Edit: To me, the most interesting thing to look at in this showcase is the
"shape" of the sparkline (which indicates stability) combined with the percent
delta change next to it (click on it to get absolute numbers).

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tel
Oh man, this is fun!

I'd merge the chart and the current followers count. Even after you click the
delta to find its absolute count, it's difficult to interpret it (to me).
Place a green dot at the end of the chart and a red at the start and then
color code two numbers to correspond. It'll give a sense of scale and
variation that's currently missing. It'll also immediately suggest a linear
model for followers over the last X days which might be a good summary for
some names.

I'm not sure what to draw from the scale-independent representation you've got
right now since I can't tell if wide swings in the sparkline indicate
something really changed in way people follow that name or if it's just noise.
This is a perfect opportunity for some sort of random process model which
could be used to suggest that certain spikes (such as the recent one for
@reddit) are maybe more interesting that real random variation.

I'd also look for ways to investigate and highlight weird behaviors like
@greplin's bimodalism. That a pretty huge.

I'm not sure I understand how the expanded interface matches to the
sparklines, actually. Posterous' doesn't match up with the sparkline much at
all that I can see. Are you doing linear detrending?

I suppose as always there's no magic bullet for information presentation.
There are any number of questions I think you could ask of a data set like
this (stability, relative growth, comparison with other metrics like
investment or publicity, looking for spikes).

I imagine that comparing each different company against the others would
probably be not terribly useful since they're all at different scales, but I'd
be very interested in things like how well data from one source could be
predicted from all the others (which just starts out as computing correlation
between them all) which might help you to separate out whole market trends
from successes from each particular company.

The Tuftean method, which I support, still desires a complete, untransformed
view of the raw data. So don't remove the sparklines. Just make them more
interpretable by giving scale to the shape using further real data. Any of
these cross-company models can potentially be added as additional information
to the sparklines. Charts remain interesting and interpretable so long as
they're drawn mostly in data-ink and are hierarchically readable.

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ivankirigin
The one for Dropbox is wrong, if only that it misses the larger history and
trends.

We doubled followers in a weekend by testing but not launching
<http://dropbox.com/free>

Then we did Dropquest, and got another bump.

If we add twitter following to the getting-started quest
<http://dropbox.com/gs> we could blow those changes out of the water.

A graph with context:
<https://www.dropbox.com/s/mwmyb8zmt4kufis/at_dropbox.png>

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shazow
Emphasis on "past 30 days". Your graph with context shows most activity before
January, whereas mine only begins in February.

I wish I had the foresight to start monitoring earlier.

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ivankirigin
You might be able to find other data sources, scraping
<http://twittercounter.com/> for example

Also, API endpoints for friendship might have a follower_since date, and you
can approximate the history. In so far as unfollowing is rare compared to
following, it would be accurate.

<http://dev.twitter.com/doc/get/friendships/show> maybe?

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shazow
Unfollowing is not as rare as you think. Out of all follows/unfollows
SocialGrapple has tracked so far (for detailed accounts), 35% are unfollows of
the subject account (63% unfollows from the subject account).

I did check the API, Twitter doesn't give you historical relationship data
like that. This is something that SocialGrapple was built to solve.

Scraping is something I haven't considered, though being a tertiary source of
data is something I'd like to avoid (I already have nightmares of Twitter
shutting me down for no reason). I'm not even sure how accurate
TwitterCounter's data is, at least I can account for my own and Twitter's
mistakes. I'll give it some more thought nonetheless.

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immad
Heyzap is number 8, woohoo.

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shazow
I'm thinking I need to add big fat position numbers to each row and start
tracking change in that. :P

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immad
Being able to count from the top is part of the challenge.

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tomdeal
Interesting data, but unfortunately nothing you can see a trend in (other than
the most well known companies have the most followers). One good advice you
can take from this data: If you want to have many followers, you have to tweet
more than once a day.

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khangtoh
So what's the value for these charts? Does it co-relate to the fact that the
more followers the more successful the YC company is?

I really don't get the point of this post, and I'm commenting because I care
about knowing the point of this post.

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shazow
There's no specific point or statement, it's just "interesting data" that you
can draw your own conclusions from.

For one, it's a nice overview of which YC companies are active on Twitter and
which are not so much. Which are recently growing a lot, and which are
stagnating.

It's also interesting to compare the number of followers to the number of
following/tweets. We can see that Dropbox has very disproportional numbers,
turns out this is because following @Dropbox on Twitter gives you a reward on
their service.

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jdp23
Interesting how asymmetric the ratios are for almost all YC companies: they're
happy to have people follow them, but not in general interested in following
back.

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afinlayson
Awesome Andrey keep up the good work!

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ceelee
Can you also add @tellfi (YC W11)

