yUML was a little web app that I created a few months ago. I tweeted about it on Twitter, and the results were both amazing and confusing.

I thought it would be fun to to share some of the statistics - good and bad.

Days 1-4: Warming Up

After putting yUML on it's server, I mentioned it to a few friends. I hadn't really mentioned it in any public forums.

I first recall telling Dario Quintana about it first, and I forgot to tell him that it wasn't ready for public consumption yet.

Here's how yUML looked on the Google analytics in those first few days.

I think you'll agree, pretty quiet...

Days 5-8: Eek!

Once the cat was out of the bag, I decided to announce yUML on twitter. I had less than 20 followers at the time, and didn't really use or understand twitter at all.

After that initial announcement, it was awesome watching how fast the word spread. On my monitor I could see tons of tweets about twitter happening in real-time, it was great fun. (Note, I used a TweetDeck search column for monitoring twitter)

To my pleasant surprise, that single tweet went on to generate over 20,000 visits to the site in the first three days. As someone who's never done this kind of thing, I was bowled over.

20,000+. That's a big return on a single 140 character tweet for an idea that's incredibly niche.

Days 9+: Quiet :(

After that brief period, things got very quiet. It was like some crazy Mexican wave where the news got around fast and everyone stood up and waved, then... total inactivity.

Wow. Where did everyone go!? I'd love to know if this is a common pattern, or if it's down to the suckyness of my project. I'm sure some savvy internet marketeer out there could explain all this...

Anyway, it's not all bad. After a fairly long quiet spell, things are looking up.

Last Week: Warming Up...

Interestingly, yUML appears to be back on the up over the last week. I can see the tweets increasing daily again, and the Google stats reflect this trend too.

Over the last few days, between 700 and 1000 UML diagrams were being generated daily. This is a 200% increase on previous weeks.

I'm not sure why things are back on the up again. Maybe it's some of the tweaks I've made, or maybe someone popular stumbled across it and mentioned it. Who knows.

Anyway, hopefully someone will find all this interesting. I do! Would be great to hear about other peoples successes and failures with twitter as a product launchpad.