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Tracking Cuba Gooding Jr’s Twitter follower count

Happened to see Cuba Gooding Jr’s first tweet about 30 minutes or so after he created it.

Update: @cubagoodingjr is no longer active so not getting tweets from it any longer

At the time his profile said he had 559 followers. A few minutes later I refreshed his profile and saw the follower count had increased to 590 and every few minutes it kept increasing. By the end of the day he had about 4,000 followers.

I thought it would be interesting to track how his follower count changed going forward. So I used the Twitter API to get his follower count once per day, save the data, and then created a web page to visualize his follower count per day.

cubatweet

After 2 days Cuba had about 7,000 followers which averaged out to about 175 new followers per hour.  However, the number of new followers slowed down quickly to 30 or so new followers per day and after about 3 months he only gets about 10 new followers per day.  In fact, some days, he has net loss of followers, eg more people unfollow than him, than new follows on that day.

For the technically inclined, I setup an automatic retrieval of Cuba’s Tweets using Twitter’s API and the Tweepy Python module scheduled to run daily using a cron job.

The follower counts get put into a database. I created a PHP web page application to retrieve the data from the database, and create a web page that includes the Google Charts API to create a simple line chart to show Cuba’s regularly updated follower count by day.

You can get the cron job and PHP web page code from my  Github repository. 

If you want to run this code yourself you will need a Twitter developer account and an OAuth file.

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How to move Google Chart x-axis to top of chart

The newest Google Charts API allows you to more easily change the axis that you want the ticks and labels are on.

In older version you had to create a secondary axis with dummy data and hide it showing only the axis with the real data on the where you want it (eg right side instead of left or top instead of bottom).

You will still do this in the new version but it is easier because you can use the ‘axes’ option which is part of the ‘Dual-axis’ feature .

Note that you will continue to use the hAxis and vAxis options as normal but will also use a new option called axes in which you specify the ‘side’ you want axis on.

Also note that the axes option will be used to name the axis so the hAxis or vAxis option axis title will be ignored.

Here is example options showing axes options being used to the x-axis on the top of a horizontal bar chart:

//set chart options
var options = {
     title: ”,
     width: ‘80%’,
     height: 700,
     bar: { groupWidth: ‘95%’ },
     legend: { position: ‘none’ },
     bars: ‘horizontal’,
     hAxis: {
          title: ‘my x axis’,
          minValue: 0,
          format: ‘decimal’,
          textPosition: ‘out’,
     },
     vAxis: {
          title: ‘my y axis’,
          textPosition: ‘out’
     },
     axes: {
          x: {
               0: { side: ‘top’, label: ‘my x axis’}
          },
          y: {
               0: { side: ‘left’, label: ‘my y axis’}
          }
}