Your visionary leadership in the world of technology has had a profound impact on my life.  I sincerely thank you for dedicating your life to showing the world that user centric design matters, great marketing and positioning is crucial to a technology's success, and having the guts to take a controversial stance to drive change pays off.  Your 1997 WWDC Closing Keynote (below) was truly awe inspiring and clearly set the tone for things to come.  You taught me that being different doesn't matter, being the best is all that matters.  You gave me the confidence to challenge the status quo, take big educated risks with big upsides, and follow your passions wherever they may lead you.

Your endless drive and crystal ball-like wisdom have helped to shape my core philosophies.  You will be sorely missed.

Thanks,
Joe 

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Features

• Airport Weather
• Parking Lot Status and Rates
• Flight Arrival and Departure information
• Airlines with links to their websites and customer service phone numbers (for when you need immediate assistance)
• FAA Airport Delays
• Terminal information
  • Ground Transportation
  • Dining
  • Shopping
  • Amenities
  • Services
• View Boston Logan social networking sites
  • FourSquare
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • YouTube

Since there are several data points that are of interest simultaneously to best paint the picture, I found myself immediately drawn to one of my favorite data visualization tools for large data sets: The Bubble Chart.  What I found when when going through the data was that while there were no easy quadrants to identify groups or types of users, there was a "sweet spot" that has more or less a defacto engagement rate to target.

So let's break down this chart.  The data is based upon a random subset of twitter users identified by sucking in a days worth of the Twitter "Firehose" stream (in my case just looking at the "Sprinkler" or 1% of all twitter traffic).  For each user, I obtained up to the last 200 tweets as well as some overall user stats (i.e. followers, # of all time tweets, account creation date, etc.).  From this raw data, I distilled some core stats that I thought would be of most interest.  I examined each of the individual tweets per user and placed them into buckets of @Replies, Retweets and Other.  I also calculated the average # of tweets per day for each user, as well as their percentage of @Replies and Retweets.  Using this data, I sorted the list by # of followers descending (to ensure all data points are visible) and plotted the data points with the follower count representing the size of the bubble.

While there is a lot going on in this chart, what you can see is a bunching of data points (the "sweet spot") between 40-60% @Replies matched with 1-30 tweets/day.  If you actually think about it, this makes a lot of sense.  If you're replying more than that, you're most likely at risk of loosing followers since the tweet's relevance may be lesser to the greater audience.  If you're not engaging enough, you lose the interactiveness of the medium and thus become more of a one-way communicator.  Match this with the tweets rate (or tweets/day).  If you never tweet, obviously you're not engaging.  If you tweet too much, your followers may not be able to keep up.  Thus, staying within the "sweet spot", you're best equipped for engagement success.

I'd be remiss if I didn't also look at the same effects of Retweets.  The chart below shows that the "sweet spot" for Retweets is more like 0-10% at the same 1-30 tweets/day rate.

And here's the scatter chart to show the same picture without the bubble obstruction.

What do you think about these "sweet spots"?  Do you personally find yourself falling within or are you a complete outlier?

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The app is free to download and use, as it is supported via the ads that are displayed.  So, if you have a few seconds, go ahead and give it a quick try.  Let me know what you think and if you have any ideas for ways to improve upon it.  I have thought that it might be cool to do a name lookup on the public IP, as well as perhaps identify the router's IP and do a name lookup on that as well.  I really want this to be a legitimately useful yet super simple network utility.

Thanks,
Joe