I'm shuttering Tweeterboard

Last fall I built a site called Tweeterboard. Tweeterboard was an experiment in using conversation (specifically @username messages) to measure influence within Twitter.

But this week I realized that I no longer have the time, energy, interest or technical abilities to maintain it. So I'm shutting it down.

Tweeterboard started as a fun diversion. At the time a lot of people were using follower counts as a way of finding influential people on Twitter. I thought I could do better by tracking conversation between twitterers. I started scanning people's twitter streams, and adapted Google's PageRank algorithm to produce a influence score. (If you think of @ replies as one-way links between people, you'll understand why PageRank works as way to analyze Twitter conversations.)

There were lots of good things about Tweeterboard. I learned a great deal about PHP and MySQL, and it exercised the little bits of my brain that weren't fried from dealing with a book and a baby. It had a few thousand followers on Twitter, and was a decent success by the standards of Twitter aggregators. A few people even wrote some nice things about it.

Most importantly, Tweeterboard occasionally confirmed my intuitions about who *should* be popular--like Susan Reynolds on Frozen Pea Friday and Barack Obama after he secured the democratic nomination. While Scoble and Jason Calacanis and others who make a point of collecting followers occasionally made it to the top, they weren't there consistently. So I take some satisfaction in creating something that rewarded people for conversation rather than just promiscuous friending.

Tweeterboard also had its downsides, the big one being that running an aggregator is no fun. It's difficult technically and it only makes sense at scale--it has to be big before it's really useful. I'm a decent amateur programmer, but I have to admit that I find this scaling stuff a bit dull and, actually, hard. It's the kind of thing best left to professionals. (I think the folks at Summize could do a much better job with conversation analytics.)

On top of that, there aren't all that many rewards for building things on top of Twitter. Sure, there are tons of active Twitter users. But with all the outages and the arbitrary changes in the API limits, I just haven't been feeling the love. Tweeterboard's gone from a fun diversion to a distraction.

So as of tonight, it's done.

I'll continue to use Twitter (you'll find me there as gsmith). I really hope the Twitter team is able to get that application back on track.