Uladoo Blog: A Twitter App Adventure

Promoting a Product with Twitter (aka Twitter Marketing)

Since Uladoo.com is a twitter app, it seemed logical to us to market it using twitter, but it hasn’t been exactly obvious how to do that effectively. So we’ve done some experiments trying to figure it out. Here’s what we tried and how it turned out:

• Tweeting about Uladoo - when Uladoo went live, I tweeted about it, and so did Shawn. We got some nice re-tweets out of it, and we garnered some users.
• Using @Uladoo - When we started Uladoo, we really thought the public-ness of posting to a chart would help it spread, and we were mostly right. When a twitter users sees someone they follow tweet something like “@uladoo calories 1200 Pigged out at Hardee’s”, it’s natural to check out uladoo’s profile and see what it’s all about. That totally happened. What we didn’t really appreciate was how quickly people would get irritated with the updates. This was made perfectly clear when I started tweeting my calories as I consumed them - even my friends threatened to stop following me, and before long we implemented direct messaging to Uladoo. This approach was totally a double-edged sword.
• Getting others to tweet about uladoo - one of the most effective things I did to promote Uladoo was email Marshall Kirkpatrick, a journalist with about 10,000 followers. He tweeted about it the same day, and we enjoyed a really nice round of re-tweets for the next two days.
• Playing the follow-me-follow-you game - If you’ve had a twitter account for long, you’ve seen this game played. Someone you’ve never heard of follows you, and if you follow them back they stick around. If you don’t they drop you. There are tools for automating this, and it seems lots of people are using them. One day I used search.twitter.com to just randomly follow people and see what came of it. I was surprised by the amount of followers I got back. I was also surprised at the complete lack of any sort of corresponding bump in our stats. Nothing. Not even a blip. If you’re going to take this approach, you’ve got to do a much better job of identifying your target audience than I did.
• Spamming people - I used twitter search to target people I thought might like using uladoo (I think I focused on fitness) and used @reply to send the unsolicited messages. I felt very uncomfortable about this, cuz it was kind of spamming, but it worked. A good portion of the people I tweeted @ retweeted me, and we got more users. The only bad thing about it was I used my twitter account (aldos) instead of the uladoo account, so everyone who followed me got spammed as well. My boss almost unfollowed me again. Lesson learned - use a twitter account that is specific to your product, not your personal account.
• Auto DM Followers - At first I tried I tried a human-ish message. This made me feel icky. I hate getting auto DMs when I follow someone, cuz it’s so obviously a computer pretending to be a person. I let that go on for a few days, but couldn’t get over the ick. I was just about to turn it off when I had a moment of clarity - a robot pretending to be a human is false and annoying, but would a robot admitting to being a robot have the same problem? So, I changed the message to something like “Thanks for following uladoo - the twitter powered charting robot. uladoo.com”. I felt better about that, but I really don’t know how well it works because I don’t have a tool to tell me if people are clicking on my tweets or not.

Promoting a product with Twitter is a weird game. I’m not sure it works yet - I’ve certainly had a mixed bag in terms of results. I’m beginning to invest in some tools to help me out, like something to help me know which of my tweets people actually click on links in. Check back after a while - I’ll be posting updates as I learn more about promoting Uladoo with Twitter.

Embeddable Charts and a Uladoo Chart Domain Specific Language

First Things First - Embeddable Charts Now Available and other new features!

You can now embed your uladoo charts on your web site for your readers to check out. It’s really easy to do - just put your user name and chart name in the following script and paste it on a web page. Piece of cake.

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://uladoo.com/javascripts/embed_uladoo_chart.js?username=USER_NAME_HERE&chartname=CHART_NAME_HERE”>

This is still a beta feature - please let us know if you have any troubles.

Also, you may have noticed you can now choose to display 10, 30, or 60 days of data in your chart.

Finally, Shawn’s working on a little widget you can use to put your chart on your Facebook page. That should be ready soon.

Moving Uladoo Charts to a DSL?

I had a fun and interesting breakfast with Patrick Foley (@patrickfoley) a few weeks ago. Among the many things we talked about, one of the recurring themes was about introducing a DSL to uladoo.com allowing users to control more aspects of their charts from twitter.

I really like this idea, and I’ve been thinking it over ever since. Now I’m getting sick of just thinking it through - I want to get something out there and have people slap it around a bit.

So here’s a first cut at a DSL. It’s not complete by a long shot, nor is it implemented (so don’t start sending messages to uladoo trying to change your chart type just yet). I’m just putting the draft DSL here so people can suggest changes to it. Right off the bat, let me acknowledge Stephen Bailey’s help in creating this draft - he supplied me some suggestions for commands.

All of these commands would work whether you used “D uladoo” or “@uladoo” to post them. For simplicity’s sake, I’m gonna use @uladoo here.

Interactive Commands

Any commands that result in a reply from uladoo being sent will include a “?”.

@uladoo chart_name ? Get last value tweeted - uladoo will reply back with the last value posted to your chart

@uladoo ? Regular old tweet - for sending tweets to us that you don’t want to add to a chart, like for asking a question. Example: @uladoo ? How do I embed a chart on my site?

@uladoo ?help Usage options - replies back with a list of all the commands included in the DSL

@uladoo chart_name ?history:X Send me the last X values I tweeted

@uladoo chart_name ?delta Send me the delta between this tweet and the one before it

@uladoo chart_name ?stats Send me statistics about my chart (average, mean, standard deviation, etc).

@uladoo chart_name ?embed Send me the code for embedding my chart.

You would be able to combine commands with each other and with posting values, like this:

@uladoo weight 255.6 ?delta would post a new value of 255.6 to my weight chart and then reply back with the delta between 255.6 and the previous value in my chart.

@ualdoo weight 243 ?history:10 | ?stats would post a new value of 243 and reply back with statistics for the last 10 tweets.

Commands for Configuring Your Chart

@uladoo chart_name goal=X Terminates the right end of the previous goal line (if it exists) and creates a horizontal line starting from the day it was tweeted and extending to +infinity.

@uladoo chart_name range=X Sets the default range of the chart to X days

@uladoo chart_name type=TYPE Sets the default type of the chart (line, bar, pie, etc)

@uladoo chart_name delete_chart Deletes the chart

@uladoo chart_name +series SERIES_NAME Adds a series called SERIES_NAME to your chart

@uladoo chart_name -series SERIES_NAME Deletes a series called SERIES_NAME from your chart

@uladoo chart_name series_name value Adds a value to a series in your chart

@uladoo chart_name +user USER_NAME Allows twitter user USER_NAME to post values to your chart

@uladoo chart_name -user USER_NAME Stops twitter user USER_NAME from posting values to your chart

@uladoo chart_name +public Allows anyone to post values to your chart

@uladoo chart_name -public Removes public posting from your chart

@uladoo user_name:chart_name value Posts a value to another user’s chart

@uladoo chart_name +user_series Each users values will be in a separate series.

@uladoo chart_name -user_series Each users values will be in a single combined series.

@uladoo ?mash chart_name chart_name chart_name … Replies with a url of a mashup of all the charts listed.

@uladoo ?mash user_name:chart_name user_name:chart_name user_name:chart_name … Replies with a url of a mashup of all the charts listed.

Chart Your Life with Uladoo and Twitter

Skipping The Idea Retention Pond
I have lots of ideas for web applications. Some of them are fairly stupid, others have been pretty cool. Most of the time, I don’t do anything with an idea other than think about them. Every now and then, an idea will really stick over time and I’ll do something about it.

Uladoo.com was a completely different story. It didn’t spend any time at all in the idea retention pond. It came to me in the shower and I was pitching it to Carl Erickson at Atomic Object before my hair was even dry. Carl thought the idea was cool, so we pitched it to his developers. It wasn’t long before we were under way.

Chart your life with Uladoo
So… what the heck is uladoo. Uladoo is too things - a twitter account and a web site that play nice together. Twitter a message to @uladoo and it will turn it into a chart, like this:

@uladoo calories 1400 I ate half a plate of brownies. Stomach hurts really bad

If you’ve never sent a tweet like this before, uladoo will automagically make you a chart called calories with the first value as 1400. If it’s not your first tweet, it will add a new value of 1400 to your existing chart. It uses the date and time you sent the tweet to place it on the x-axis, so you don’t need to worry about that.

To look at this new chart, you can just go to uladoo.com/USER NAME (your twitter user name) and see all the charts you’ve created (except uladoo.com hasn’t launched yet, so don’t expect to see your chart there just yet).

Ideas We Experimented with Developing Uladoo
For the record, I didn’t do any real work on uladoo.com. Carl Erickson, Shawn Crowley, and the others at Atomic Object did all the hard work and I occasionally got to play with their work product. But we did have a few discussions about web application design principles we wanted to base uladoo.com on.

Here are a few of the ideas we put into play that really stuck with me:

I hope those of you who twitter will try uladoo out, and let me know what you think.