The DRWTrivia Stat Tracker was a project I put together to give myself a chance to play with the Twitter API a little bit.
Every week, the official Twitter account of the Detroit Red Wings would run a trivia contest using the #DRWTrivia hashtag. Their system was to tweet a question, then a few miutes later they would tweet the answer and the name of the person who won that question. The winner would be the first person to reply to @DetroitRedWings with the correct answer and the #DRWTrivia hashtag.
I used the Twitter API to find all tweets from @DetroitRedWings with the #DRWTrivia hashtag. Then I filtered further for ones that had “Question 1” or “Question No. 1” (or any number through five). Sorted chronologically, the first one with #1 would be the question and the second would be the declaration of a winner and the correct answer.
In the tweet declaring a winner, I looked for anything that looked like a Twitter username to flag as the winning user.
Taking it a step further, I then used the general search API to find all tweets to @DetroitRedWings with the #DRWTrivia hashtag in between the question and answer tweet from the official account. This let me see each response to the question and determine how quickly each respondent replied.
One caveat is that the search API only goes back one week, so I could only get the response history for the contests that took place after I started developing this site. Had I been able to get more complete data, I would have set up more stat tracking.
The above text and images were copied directly from my original portfolio as I imported it over to the blog. It was not updated for re-publishing. This project launched in December 2012.
