Twitterank Creator Speaks

After my post yesterday afternoon about Twitterank, its creator Ryo Chijiiwa contacted me by email to ask if I’d like to hear his side of the story: I offered him a guest post. Over to Ryo:

I blame the Family Guy. There I was in my hotel room, where I’m staying while in NY for business, watching episodes of The Family Guy on my laptop like any other Joe the Coder on a Tuesday night. But then I ran out of episodes. None of this would’ve happened if there were enough Family Guy episodes to watch on Hulu.

Hi. My name is Ryo, and I’m the developer of Twitterank, which is not some grand scheme to steal thousands of Twitter accounts, but a casual experiment gone horribly, horribly right. Here’s my side of the story:

With no more tales of Peter and Co. to entertain me, I turned to Twitter. I was browsing through a day’s worth of tweets from my friends, when something or another got me thinking about @replies. As many of you are aware, I’m sure, @replies allow users to essentially “send” tweets to other users, which effectively turns Twitter into one giant semi-public conversation.

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