{"id":343,"date":"2012-09-11T17:45:10","date_gmt":"2012-09-11T16:45:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pgregg.com\/blog\/?p=343"},"modified":"2019-10-16T23:51:17","modified_gmt":"2019-10-16T22:51:17","slug":"menshn-stats-and-where-they-came-from","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.pgregg.com\/blog\/2012\/09\/menshn-stats-and-where-they-came-from\/","title":{"rendered":"Menshn stats and where they came from."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You may have noticed, if you have been following my <a title=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/pgregg\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/pgregg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">twitter<\/a> feed, that I have been posting some <a href=\"http:\/\/menshn.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Menshn<\/a> statistics recently. You may also be wondering how I came by these numbers.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet tw-align-center\"><p><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/search\/%23Menshn\">#Menshn<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/search\/%23MenshnStats\">#MenshnStats<\/a> Number of active users: 211<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Paul Gregg (@pgregg) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/pgregg\/status\/244386085071884288\" data-datetime=\"2012-09-08T10:45:57+00:00\">September 8, 2012<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" type=\"text\/javascript\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\u00a0 Someone sent me a message on twitter pointing me to the URL:\u00a0menshn.com\/data\/chat.php (which shall remain unclickable for reasons that will become apparent). \u00a0This web page basically dumps the last 20-30k &#8220;menshns&#8221; out in a semi-structured html data format. \u00a0In total (at time of writing) it dumps 31MB of data. So you can see why I&#8217;m not making it a link. I&#8217;ve no desire to overload their systems.<\/p>\n<p>Upon looking at the &#8220;View source&#8221; on the menshn.com homepage, it seems that they use this to back end the automatically updating feed on their homepage. \u00a0<\/p>\n<p>If you watch the traffic generated by your browser &#8211; you can see it making a request every 4 seconds for\u00a0https:\/\/menshn.com\/data\/chat.php?roomid=*&amp;lastid=73405<\/p>\n<p>So, now we know where my source got the link from &#8211; seems if you don&#8217;t supply any arguments, it just dumps everything it has. And so, with such a dataset we are able to do some metrics.<\/p>\n<p>First up, I parsed all the data out to produce a simple ID,Room,Name,Message text file &#8211; just to prove to myself that I had understood the data set and was parsing it correctly.<\/p>\n<p>Next, I built into the parser, metric building. Count the unique users, count number of posts\/menshns, count number of rooms\/topics, etc.<\/p>\n<p>From this I have the top line information:\u00a0<\/p>\n<pre style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">Number of active users: 218<\/pre>\n<pre style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">Number of active rooms: 224<\/pre>\n<p>Breaking this down further to &#8220;Top 20&#8221; lists, I get:<\/p>\n<pre style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">20 Most prolific users:\r\n 5752 janemcqueen\r\n 3240 CosensV\r\n 2019 Chriss\r\n 2011 BlackAdder\r\n 1569 PoliticsBlogorguk\r\n 1520 Xlibris\r\n 1106 DavidX\r\n 783 JOSHBHJ\r\n 782 Louise\r\n 717 EdenFisher\r\n 704 JayMcNeil\r\n 666 Grist\r\n 588 TinderWall\r\n 401 RV\r\n 384 Bozier\r\n 373 jeanprytyskacz\r\n 348 MikeARPowell\r\n 285 Silaz\r\n 251 Rabbs\r\n 239 Europe<\/pre>\n<p>And<\/p>\n<pre style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">20 Busiest rooms:\r\n 6361 \/\/ukpolitics\r\n 3216 \/\/gaymarriage\r\n 1252 \/\/religion\r\n 1014 \/\/assangecase\r\n 877 \/\/olympics2012\r\n 717 \/\/judaism\r\n 673 \/\/uselection\r\n 663 \/\/atheism\r\n 642 \/\/mormonism\r\n 585 \/\/davidcameron\r\n 527 \/\/civilliberty\r\n 479 \/\/reshuffle\r\n 474 \/\/mittromney\r\n 415 \/\/corbyelectio\r\n 394 \/\/capitalism\r\n 315 \/\/twitter\r\n 295 \/\/falklands\r\n 224 \/\/louisemensch\r\n 208 \/\/philosophy\r\n 204 \/\/catholicism<\/pre>\n<p>Growth metrics are easily obtained by performing the same test at different times. In my case, they were 3.5 days apart. Leading to the conclusion posted on twitter: \u00a0<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet tw-align-center\"><p>\nTwitter has 140m users and 340m tweets\/day. Menshn has 218 users and &lt;750 menshns\/day.<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/search\/%23menshnstats\">#menshnstats<\/a> \u2014 Paul Gregg (@pgregg) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/pgregg\/status\/245477793310322688\" data-datetime=\"2012-09-11T11:04:01+00:00\">September 11, 2012<\/a>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet tw-align-center\"><p>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/search\/%23Menshn\">#Menshn<\/a> is growing at an avg of 2 new users\/day (that post). At this rate it will take 191,780 years to catch twitter. <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/search\/%23menshnstats\">#menshnstats<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Paul Gregg (@pgregg) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/pgregg\/status\/245478347356917760\" data-datetime=\"2012-09-11T11:06:13+00:00\">September 11, 2012<\/a>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" type=\"text\/javascript\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>If you really want to see all the menshns, rather than overload the menshn server &#8211; you can obtain my parsed analysis of the dump at\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/pgregg.com\/test\/menshn\/menshnchat.txt\">http:\/\/pgregg.com\/test\/menshn\/menshnchat.txt<\/a><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d welcome comments on this. For the record &#8211; none of this information was obtained via a &#8220;hack&#8221; and no illegal acts were committed in the gathering of this information.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You may have noticed, if you have been following my twitter feed, that I have been posting some Menshn statistics recently. You may also be wondering how I came by these numbers. &nbsp; #Menshn #MenshnStats Number of active users: 211 \u2014 Paul Gregg (@pgregg) September 8, 2012 \u00a0 Someone sent me a message on twitter &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/blog.pgregg.com\/blog\/2012\/09\/menshn-stats-and-where-they-came-from\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Menshn stats and where they came from.&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7,12],"tags":[60,61,65],"class_list":["post-343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-law","category-systems","tag-louise-mensch","tag-luke-bozier","tag-menshn"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbQOUu-5x","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.pgregg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.pgregg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.pgregg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.pgregg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.pgregg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.pgregg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":806,"href":"https:\/\/blog.pgregg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions\/806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.pgregg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.pgregg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.pgregg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}