I want to track basic metrics of my main social thingies – The Ostrich Facebook page, The Ostrich Twitter account, and The Ostrich Google+ page.

My short-term goal is to have simple graphs of some basic metrics over time:

• Facebook page likes and shares, posts, post likes and shares.
• Twitter followers (and following), tweets, favorites, retweets.
• Google+ followers, views, +1’s, shares.

I’m not sure why I want this data, but if I do find a good reason in the future, I’d better start tracking it now!

In this post, I describe how I went from the idea to start collecting the data, to a deployed data collecting app using Google App Engine, in under 5 hours.