MadPat is a twitter dashboard that measures the spread of Tamil in Twitter through a series of HashTags. The name refers to Madras Pattinam- the true home of the founders, before it was rudely changed to Chennai.

MadPat started off as an internal testing tool in our prototype. With the good support that we have been getting however, from users and sponsors, we thought it would be a good opportunity to inspire Tamils all over the world to express their pride and identity. Interestingly, the campaign is branching into a social platform for the ideas and expertise of geographically distributed Tamils into a common plate of Idlies.

Why not? Being low in fats and oils, Idly is without doubt the finest example of the Tamil gastronome. Moreover, one of our founders really loves Idlies and there really isn’t too much point arguing with him on this.

Everytime you talk about one of the HashTags that you are a member of, you are spreading the beauties of Tamil to your followers. You deserve a nice big plate of Idlies for that. Of this, however, it is only fair that you pass on a proportion to the people who invited you to the HashTag based on how influential they have been on you, and keep the rest. These parents in turn pass on a proportion to their parents and keep the rest for themselves.

Direct idlies are the proportion of total Idlies you have earned by the act of ‘spreading’ your HashTags. Kurma Idlies are the Idlies you have earned as net commission from your followers.
That means you earn more direct Idlies each time you tweet a HashTag, and more Kurma Idlies each time your followers or their subsequent followers tweet the HashTag.

This is the most recent Idlies you have received as net commission from your followers. This data shows you the users who have been the most generous to you most recently.

Your follower stats show which of your followers are topping on different aspects that make you earn Idlies and spread the good word around. Your ability to earn Idlies through a follower is based on the rate at which this user gives you Idlies and the amount of Idlies you get at each time. In the long run, the position of this follower within the network is also a major driver of how much Idly you get through her or him.
Contribution: Total Kurma Idlies you have received from a follower throughout the timeline.
Recency: Latest time at which you got any Kurma Idlies from each follower.
Frequency: Number of occassions during which a follower has given you any Kurma Idlies.
Hubness: This refers to the ability of the user to earn you Idlies through their network. Roughly, this relates to the normalized number of followers a user has.
Sinkness: This refers to the possible drain in any Kurma Idlies you could otherwise earn though this user. The more people that a user is following, the more people you end up sharing your Kurma Idlies with, and the greater the drain on the Idlies you earn through this user. THIS IS A BAD THING!

Your top follower is the follower who is most likely to give you the largest amount of Idlies during the next time period. In other words, it is the most valuable follower you have in your network, and it makes a lot of sense for you to encourage this user to tweet more.

You are automatically invited to a topic when anybody you follow tweets on the topic tag. You earn Direct Idlies by tweeting on the topic tag, and the guy that got you in earns Kurma Idlies from you.

The moment anybody you follow tweets on a topic tag, you automatically get invited to the topic and may start tweeting on it. "Open Invites" are the topics that you have been invited to, but have not gotten to tweeting on already. Once you start tweeting on these topics, you begin "Participating" in the growth of that topic.

Our primary aim at MadPat is to provide you, the user, with clear, concise, and considerably awesome analytics of your performance. And graphs provide a nice visual feel of trends and behavior... The graphs at MadPat are broken down into Aggregate (for all to see), User Level (for your eyes only) and Topic Level (to figure out trends and stuff in each topic).

This is the daily increment in your Idlies, both Direct and Kurma. Occasional crests and troughs make line graphs look pretty good, but a flat-at-zero or downward trend there probably means your followers are forgetting you.

You earn your total Idlies through your own tweets (your Direct Idlies), your Follower's own tweets (their Direct Idlies), and the tweets of your followers' Network (their Kurma Idlies). The more network tweets you have, the faster you grow in ranks and the more difficult it is to diplace your position. And being indispensable is an amazing feeling.

Your relative ownership in a topic is the percentage of tweets in that topic that you have personally sent out. In other words, this is the degree to which you monopolize the topic. While a relative ownership between 10-20% implies you ahve a good stronghold, really high ownership scores in a topic may hint that you are probably talking too much and nobody really cares!

You mean, other than understanding your influence amongst your followers, social connection, moral satisfaction, good Karma and a feeling of having done your bit to TamilDom? We are currently parenting with a team of sponsors to offer awards such as T-Shirts, Movie Tickets, CDs and concert invitations for your Idly Mileage.

If you don’t know how it got there, you should probably call the authorities. The squirrel doesn’t have anything much to do with the Idlies or us so it really isn’t meant to be there.

Of course you could! As a user, please feel free to suggest any new tag concepts to help spread Tamil in more ways. Also we are a pretty infant team that takes your complaints pretty seriously and your complements even better, so email us at madpat@beheard.in

We are constantly looking for more sponsors, so if you could help us get some local leads or suggest a few places to look, we would really really appreciate it.