BI Revolution

Wouldn't it be great if you could just call up a supercomputer and ask it to do your data-wrangling for you? Actually, scratch that, no-one uses the phone anymore. What'd be really cool is if machines could respond to your queries straight from Twitter. It's a belief that's shared by Wolfram Research, which has just launched the Tweet a Program system to its computational knowledge engine, Wolfram Alpha. In a blog post, founder Stephen Wolfram explains that even complex queries can be executed within the space of 140 characters, including data visualizations.

In the Wolfram Language a little code can go a long way. And to use that fact to let everyone have some fun with the introduction of Tweet-a-Program. Compose a tweet-length Wolfram Language program, and tweet it to @WolframTaP. TheTwitter bot will run your program in the Wolfram Cloud and tweet the result back to you. One can do a lot with Wolfram Language programs that fit in a tweet. It’s easy to make interesting patterns or even complicated fractals. Putting in some math makes it easy to get all sorts of elaborate structures and patterns.

The Wolfram Language not only knows how to compute π, as well as a zillion other algorithms; it also has a huge amount of built-in knowledge about the real world. So right in the language, you can talk about movies or countries or chemicals or whatever. And here’s a 78-character program that makes a collage of the flags of Europe, sized according to country population. There are many, many kinds of real-world knowledge built into the Wolfram Language, including some pretty obscure ones. The Wolfram Language does really well with words and text and deals with images too.

What factors go into determining how many Twitter followers you gain (and lose) each day? I analyzed thousands of accounts to find the answer.

Key takeaways

The types of content you tweet have significant impacts on attracting and keeping followers.Hashtags probably aren't dead.Each tweet that includes an image, has a hashtag, is a retweet, or mentions someone associates with 2-6% more daily followers.

Just as it does with Rand, your account will likely have individualized factors that move the needle for you.You can explore these via Excel! Check your Followerwonk account for a complimentary spreadsheet of your Twitter activity.Don't forget to follow me @petebray so that I can test whether this blog post significantly moves my follower count! :) And let me know what you uncover.