Montag, 7. März 2011

A week of awesome tweets

 Note: this has been posted Jan 16th, 2011 9:04pm somewhere else. I decided to bring it in here, to keep my chickens in one place.

Introduction
One of the features in the new SUMO is the invitation to help Firefox users on Twitter (https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/army-of-awesome). Tweets, mentioning Firefox,  get filtered out from the main stream and the Army of awesome (AoA) gets the opportunity to help.
Here's one typical yelp for help, with user's Firefox evidently falling to pieces:

The careless spelling and the four-letter wording is typical for this environment: I have a problem and I want to have it fixed now. The answer provided is a copy of the 16-odd boilerplate answers available to AoA.
I have collected about a week of answers to find out
  • how many are involved in AoA
  • what are the problems they try to address
  • how successful they are
  • ... just curious
How many are involved?
In the week of 7-15 Jan there were at least 772 tweets with #fxhelp tag; at least, because my own participation in this army has been consistently and completely stricken from the public tag listing, statistics etc since around the middle of December. I have thus added a typical week of my own saved contributions. Note that it's quite possible that the dark number is even bigger;  nobody but Twitter can tell.
How many are involved in the army: there's been 54 contributors. Here's a general picture:

legend: how many participants tweeted how many times; for instance 5 tweeted 10-20x.
On the low side there's a group of casual participants (<10) with 36 members, with 20 out them turning up only once. On the high side there's  the group at the top with 7 participants who twitted considerably more.
The following diagram shows the total number of tweets for every of the five groups above:

The top group, counting 7, accounts for 538 / 853 = ~60% of the total traffic.
What are the problems?
The answers provided indicate what the original question has been. The boilerplate suggestions have the possible problems and suggestions pretty well covered. The suggestions are provided in five groups, tagged with #~ in the pie-chart below:

The support questions were one third of twits and,  surprisingly,  the "no URL provided" group was second biggest at 25%. Here's the inner workings of the Support group:
  •   107 Fix crashes
  •    66 slow Firefox startup / Firefox is slow
  •    53 Firefox does not behave
  •    32 High RAM usage 
  •    16 Quick Firefox fixes
The "Get involved" group on the other side of the spectrum looks as follows:
  • 10 Become a beta tester
  •   9 Report a bug
  •   6 Get involved with Mozilla
  •   3 Mozilla Developer Network 
  •   0 Join Drumbeat 
Conclusion
The question of course remains: does it matter? Is there any traction behind it? Surprisingly I have received a lot of feedback, about 50 since the beginning of January. Negative reactions were just a few, some of them sobering and useful like this one:
  • ... that was lame. give me a link when I have no browser.LOL I rebooted & now i'm good. thanks. 
The majority, however, was worth a smiley each. Here's a few:
  • thanks :) yeah I had a couple to update but it is all good now :) I have bookmarked that link too and I will check it regularly :)
  • My addons/plugins are all up to date. I'll try disabling them to see if any are causing problems. Thanks for the suggestion!
  • Thanks for the suggestion will check it out. Happened when we attached files in google mail.
  • Hey thanks a lot!!! :)
To avoid ending on the high-fiving mote, here's a few thoughts:
  • Tweeting can turn into spam if used in a fire-and-forget mode. Do not forget to check the feedback.
  • The perfect score of 0 for Drumbeat provokes me. To be honest, it is hard to sell Drumbeat to desperate teenagers, who can't tweet to their heart's content because Firefox is giving them hives.
  • Thinking of those 20 single-twit contributors: fact is they tagged their message with fxhelp. Our future warriors? A pool of dig-Mozilla aka 5$ Mozillians? Dig it!