Charts in Tweetbot 4
October 3, 2015 at 8:44 AM by Dr. Drang
I’ve been using Tweetbot 4 for a few hours now, and I really like it.
This is not a review. There are several other places you can go for that. What I want to talk about are the little charts it provides in the Stats view. They’re fun without being obsessive the way Twitter’s own analytics charts are.
At the top is an activity timeline for the past seven days. By going back only seven days, the chart is clean, uncluttered, and easy to read at a glance.
You’ll notice that it’s a Bezoan chart, with no scale for the vertical axis. I think that’s OK in this context. The idea is to give you a quick sense of what’s been going on for the past week. Again, if you want to pore over the details, go to Twitter’s analytics site to see how many of your followers are self-employed weight conscious Verizon users.
One thing about this chart that I’m pretty sure is a bug is the horizontal labeling. Based on how the final point starts low and rises through the day, I believe it represents the current day’s activity, even though it’s labeled as yesterday. In fact, all of the day labels appear to be one day off.
Below this chart is a list of your tweets, each with bar charts showing how often it’s been favorited and retweeted.
The two bars obviously aren’t drawn to the same scale, but what scales are they drawn to? Tweetbot’s Paul Haddad gave the answer in a tweet a couple of days ago:
@chase_mccoy all relative to your most popular tweet of the last week.
— Paul Haddad (@tapbot_paul) Oct 1 2015 6:01 PM
I think that’s a good choice and is in keeping with the seven-day scale of the chart at the top. In this case, the absolute numbers are given, but the bar charts are relative to the past week. If you keep scrolling down, you’ll start seeing tweets that are more than seven days old, and it’s likely you’ll run into some that have more favorites or retweets than the seven-day maximum. Those bars are pegged to the right end and don’t give an accurate representation of their value, but their numbers are still correct. You just have to keep in mind that the charts on this screen are all based on the past week.
Overall, I like these new Tweetbot charts because they’re fun and casual. Social media professionals will probably not find them acceptable, but who cares what they think?
