1 Year of Gaming Tweets [Infographic]

We want to let the image speak for itself, so will keep this entry brief. What you see below is approximately one year of Twitter video game-related chatter from the period of July 27 2009 to July 22 2010. It shows the 150 most commonly used words in gamers' tweets. The graph was generated using over 28 Million gaming-related tweets collected by AggreTweet - a live streaming aggregator for gaming conversations happening on Twitter. Platforms, Games, Events - even Communities like Joystiq and Kotaku have real-time feeds on AggreTweet.

As promised, we'll keep this entry short. But I want to leave you with one last thing: we've recently launched our #PartyUp on Twitter feature to help gamers connect via Twitter - please check it out and read more about it. It's one thing for us to make it, but we need your help to spread the word! Now, enjoy this Infographic...

A Year of Gaming Tweets, in an Image:
(click to enlarge)

One Year of Gaming Tweets

Introducing #PartyUp on Twitter!

Ever find yourself in need of an extra player or two to round out your Xbox LIVE or PlayStation Network party? We've just launched a new tool for gamers that makes finding players for your favorite games easy, thanks to Twitter - called #PartyUp on Twitter!

How it works:

1. Put "#PartyUp" in any context in a tweet.
2. Watch the feed for your tweet to appear.
3. Wait for fellow gamers to @ reply you!

Hopefully gamers will find this a useful resource for further socializing their gaming experiences!

New AggreTweet Feature - Filter Top-10!

It came to our attention that given the overwhelming popularity of the Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, PS3, and newly announced Kinect, the list of Gaming Trends on the front page of AggreTweet has become a little... crowded. Since those 4 platforms were always occupying the top 4 slots in the list, it only allowed for a maximum of 6 games to trend. Once you toss a few events into the mix (like E3) which are sure to trend high for weeks on end, it starts to get a little out of hand - and functionally useless.

So we've today launched an "Options" link above the Gaming Trends which can be clicked. In it, you'll find 5 convenient check boxes which can be used to specifically filter out which topic types you want displayed (pictured left).

This feature only affects the trend graphs, it does NOT affect the actual results that will be displayed in the Live Feed. You'll still see all the topics flowing in as you'd expect. The proper way to filter down the Live Feed is to go to a specific Topic channel (to see only tweets for that topic).

As the site continues to grow, and Twitter becomes more widely used, we'll continue to design useful features to make tracking your video game conversations and trends that much more useful!

E3 2010 Nets Over 500,000 Tweets

As anticipated, E3 2010 yielded a massive amount of social media chatter, including over half a million tweets in a single week!

E3 2010 ran from June 15 - 17 of this year, with a Microsoft Press Conference on Monday the 14th, along with a ridiculous Activision concert that same evening. Essentially, this entire week was all E3. And according to AggreTweet, E3 was the top trending topic among gaming all 7 days.

To be precise, from Saturday-to-Friday of E3 week, there was a total of 605,000 tweets. Given that I am writing this entry a little before midnight, naturally that number will change by a factor of a few thousand. However, the important take-away from this is just how accurately we can predict, track, and trend Twitter activity based around video games.

You may have remembered we predicted this outcome last week. How did we know? Well that's our little secret... But we have spent a lot of time and energy perfecting our technologies here at Aggregame, and will continue to do so. AggreTweet in particular continues to prove it is the most powerful Twitter analytics software in existence, and we will be growing and expanding this technology even further in the future.

E3 to Net 500,000 Tweets in 1 Week!

Over the last several months, we've learned a lot of valuable Twitter trends and behaviors while watching the AggreTweet graphs. One thing we pride ourselves in is our ability to assess user behavior in real-time. We've gotten so good at it in-fact, we're prepared to make a prediction...

We anticipate E3 2010 chatter to net at least 500,000 Tweets in a 1 week period, Saturday-to-Friday of next week (June 12 - June 18). This will be an unprecedented amount of Twitter game-related conversations, and should set the bar for the industry.

To put this into perspective, currently the Playstation 3 (as a platform) has the highest weekly tweet count, with just over 100,000 tweets this past week. That's a product with a healthy install base, and a large library of games for players to tweet about in relation to their platform. Never has a gaming event surpassed a platform in weekly tweets - not even PAX East earlier this year.

It's shaping up to be a big year for E3 with games like Killzone 3, Halo: Reach, Gears of War 3, Medal of Honor, Call of Duty: Black Ops, SOCOM 4, Rock Band 3, Crysis 2 (to name a few), and of course the highly anticipated deep-dive into Project Natal Microsoft is expected to make at their press conference on Monday. Amidst additional rumors such as Hulu coming to the Xbox 360, and speculation on Valve's big surprise (probably Half-Life 3 / Source Engine 3), there will be plenty of things for gamers to tweet about =).

Graph Maintenance - Complete!

As noted in the previous entry, we recently updated the AggreTweet graphing technology to display more accurate information. Now, graphs will at-most be 3 minutes out of date. Considering that the graphs only plot points in 6 minutes intervals (by design), this should really not be noticeable by anybody looking.

So, in cases like a Halo: Reach BETA launch, and everyone is clamoring for a code via Twitter, you will see the spike in the graphs as soon as the next plot point on the graph is generated. This also means that if a given topic gets a high volume of tweets in rapid succession, it will rise to the Top-10 list much sooner (and accurately) than before.

We'll be monitoring performance as always, and if we notice any other anomalies we'll be sure to address them as quickly as possible. As always, look for updates here!

AggreTweet Graph Maintenance - 5/28/2010

Notice 5/28/2010: The trend graphs on AggreTweet are not displaying accurately at present, affecting overall trends / rankings. We are working to rectify.

So what does that notice atop Aggregame mean? Well in short - the overall rank-ordering of top games, as well as the graphs displaying on game channels, are not actually representative of the most current Twitter activity. This only affects the graphs - actual Tweets are flowing real-time, so that's good.

However, AggreTweet is most useful for tracking trends. It's no secret that reading the front page of AggreTweet is, for all intents and purposes, a waste of time. It's a real-time feed of every tweet for all major video games, so needless to say there's a lot of data constantly streaming in. To try to actually read everything coming in would be like swimming upstream against the current. Then again, if the stream of tweets was broken, it would be an even worse scenario.

Thankfully, we are still tracking all the data. That means once this problem is rectified (hopefully sometime over the weekend), the graphs will suddenly be displaying properly again and you'll be able to filter through that historical data (Past Day, Week, Month) and see how the weekend's trends really played out.

A Deeper Look into the Problem:

Given the volume of tweets and Twitter users AggreTweet tracks (over 20 Million tweets stored, with hundreds of thousands of Gamers contributing) our physical databases are enormous. Working with this volume of data takes time (and CPU cycles).

AggreTweet is architected in such a way that it is extremely efficient at handling high volumes of tweets, rapidly - and more importantly - handling lots of concurrent viewers watching the live feeds. So if there happens to be thousands of visitors chatting simultaneously in various Game Channels on AggreTweet, it can handle it and not crash the website due to that many people all requesting those streams concurrently.

Given this primary charge, some trade-offs must be made. One of those is in how we store and index each tweet, and subsequently how we plot that tweet against one another in the graphs. So given the nature of this particular failure (a failure to scale in quantity of total tweets, not concurrency), working to fix the issue (permanently) is a bit of a chore (and waiting game given how much data we must re-factor). Rather than put effort into a "band-aid" fix up front, we're going to spend all our time and resources fixing it the right way, once.

As such, the maintenance will take most of the weekend. We'll have an update for you when we have some conclusive results. At least we know where the problem is, and how to fix it. If we erased all historical data we could have the problem solved immediately. But that's not a very appealing option... So instead, we must arduously wade through 20 Million tweets (and more importantly, test our results to make sure this fix is not going to cause any other problems).

Apologies for the inconvenience. AggreTweet will remain online (as it is still technically functioning); you'll just have to assume that none of the rankings or graphs are displaying current data. Actually, technically all the graphs are accurate (relatively speaking), but are actually showing the plot points from hours ago. So if you hover the graph and it says that a topic had "30 tweets" 6 minutes ago, it really had 30 tweets at that particular moment - 5 hours and 6 minutes ago (because the graphing engine is so back-logged due to this performance issue).

In any event, we'll have it solved as quickly as possible. Stay tuned.