The Google spreadsheet passing the information on to this chart, which should be live, is being fed by an IFTTT recipe. For the record it doesn’t seem like you can mess around with the non-used portions of the actual worksheet where data is being written by the recipe. I was able to add another worksheet and use that to run some formulas on the worksheet where the tweets are being written. =len(‘Sheet 1’!C1) is the formula you’d write to access cell C1 of Sheet 1 and count the number of characters.
Granted, keeping track of my progress towards perfect 140 character tweets doesn’t have much value (although there’s one that’s 150 characters that’s a little puzzling) but it’s just a proof of concept. I could parse out other elements. I do need to look back at the DS106 hashtag spreadsheet and see how that’s working as I don’t see any working version of that since Twitter killed RSS support.
And a random byproduct of some other work I’m doing messing around with The Mother of All Demos. Seriously though, tell your friends. Apply for the job.