Twiffiency, Twitter Spam and the Making of Twitter-Awesomeness

When I noticed the super silly Twiffiency phenomenon blow up on Tuesday I was struck by how much people love getting graded.

Everyone saw the auto-tweets that Twiffiency sent out on your behalf and quickly tested their own.. ummm, something. See, the thing is, even now, no one has any idea what that score means!

That’s when I decided to make my own Twitter gadget, but mine would be AWESOME!

I realized that it had to be simple and look cool, so I would use big font, use the default Twitter background and present people with a score that would make them proud enough to tweet it out voluntarily.

The Twitter-Awesomeness Grader page was born on Tuesday August 17th about 11am. Mike Adams was it’s first customer at 11:17.

This was version 1.0. At this point you didn’t even have to enter your Twitter name.

After about half an hour I decided to make it seem more life-like (version 2), and add a “Enter your twitter name” part. That way people would feel like something was actually happening.

Shortly after I added a delay and a spinning icon so that you would be even more convinced that it was doing something (version 2.0.1).

Finally I added a link so people could tweet out their results to their followers.

Hundreds of people stopped by, and it was fun to do some “rapid prototyping”, but what did I really learn?

1. Making a random number generator is easy.
2. People will do something if you make it easy enough
3. Everyone likes to be rated high
4. Lots of people think any widget is actually doing something valuable.

So here’s the dirty secret: my Twitter-Awesomeness Grader is a simple random number generator (between 99 and 110). In fact, when you land on the page, your score has already been determined. Putting in a name is optional. Clicking the button fires off a javascript call that hides the form and shows the score.

I also created a Client Twitter Grader for companies that need to convince a client that their current Twitter efforts are below par.