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Stinkdigital Measures its Twitter Health With Athlete's Tool

How healthy is your Twitter account? Do you tweet informative, smart and useful tidbits -- or are you apt to inform your followers that you ate a brownie for breakfast, sans guilt? Or, you might be a combination of both. I enjoy tweeting my columns, but sometimes I come across a food truck that the whole world, or my 12 Twitter followers, must know about.

Stinkdigital decided to conduct an in-house project to determine the health of the company’s Twitter account.

Using a Nike+ FuelBand, which athletes typically wear to measure the amount of their physical activity over the course of a day, the folks at Stinkdigital created an Arduino bot and connected it to the Nike+ FuelBand. Once that was complete, the only thing left was to create an account, and Tweetfuel was born.

“The idea for TweetFuel just came from an idle conversation about using the Nike+ FuelBand as the basis for a fun hack; the rest came from there,” said Mark Pytlik, Founder, Stinkdigital. “Once we had the idea it took relatively little time to build and execute. We managed to finish everything in just under 10 days.

“We have in no way tampered with the Nike+ FuelBand, we’ve just slightly altered its purpose,” added Cameron Temple, Creative Director, Stinkdigital.

Whenever a person follows, retweets or even mentions Stinkdigital, the bot connected to the Nike+ FuelBand spins the band around. The more followers the person mentioning Stinkdigital has, the more times the band spins.

The company picked up 200 new followers since TweetFuel launched on May 24. As of writing this column, Stinkdigital had a total of 6,600 followers.

As our own health can vary by day, so does TweetFuel’s. Stinkdigital is working on ways to keep their Twitter health up, once buzz from the TweetFuel project lessens.

“TweetFuel really does reflect what happens on Twitter, so as a result we’re generally a lot less healthy on the weekends,” concluded Temple. “This is pretty much true for our bodies as well.”

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