Tweeterism » Twitter visualizations

Visible Tweets – An Animated Way of Viewing Tweets

tweeterism — Tue, 05 May 2009 06:19:55 +0000

I haven’t seen much Twitter visualization tools being developed so it was nice to find VisibleTweets, a app that allows you to enter a keyword and then see tweets being surfed up in a stream. There are only three different animations and there doesn’t seem to be a way to pause the animation which isn’t a good thing because sometimes you do see some interesting tweets you want to reply. But still, its a fun tool especially if you put it on full-screen.

TwitterFriends Helps You Rediscover Your Twitter Network

tweeterism — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 01:25:03 +0000

Twitter friends is an analytics tool which gives you more information on your Twitter social network. What kind of information? Who messages you the most, who you talk to the most, the average number of daily tweets and even your average tweet length. It also allows you to retrieve an archive of all your conversations with a specific user, just by entering his/her username against yours.

It’s useful for a quick way to determine who you interact with daily on Twitter. The focus here is on re-discovering the people that matter, the ones that proactively generate conversation or follow your twitter ramblings (as opposed to uni-directional marketing accounts). The TwitterFriends FAQ explains more:

If you live a liberal following policy (= if another user follows you, you follow back), then the network of your contact does not have any deeper meaning. But there is a smaller, much more meaningful network hidden behind your total web of followers: the relevant net. TwitterFriends helps you to find the users that are meaningful for you and keep in touch with them. Those could be users you are talking to on a regular basis or who are feeding you great links all the time.

From another perspective, a tool like Twitter Friends can also show you how limited your circle of interaction is and may encourage you to actively reach out to people you want to include in your social graph.

Twittersheep: Visualizing Your Twitter Followers

tweeterism — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 21:43:19 +0000

Twittersheep is a neat tool that allows you to create a tag cloud from the ‘bios’ of your Twitter followers. Why is this interesting? Because it gives you an instant snapshot of the type of people that you are following you. It’s handy because you don’t have the time to click through on every single profile to check the bio, an impossible task when you have a few hundred/thousand followers.

Twitter visualization tools like this give you a rough overview of your audience’s interests and might be useful, particularly if you’re using it to converse/network with others. Twittersheep requires your password to get the bios and they claim to never store it. But feel free to change your password after using it, if you’re paranoid about it.

Here’s an example of my Twitter flock:

Cursebird: Real-Time Feed of People Swearing on Twitter

tweeterism — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 01:00:41 +0000

Do you cuss on Twitter? Do the people you follow do it? Some people don’t mind it but others are instantly offended if a word like ‘fuck’ shows up on their Twitter stream.

I had a lotta fun checking out Cursebird, a real-time feed of people swearing on Twitter. On top of streaming tweets with cuss words in them, it gives you a 7 day overview of the top swear words. ‘Fuck’ is currently no.1 with a 51.33% occurence, while ‘Shit’ and ‘Bitch’ follows with 35.15% and 8.46% respectively.

It’s really interesting to see Twitter users you don’t know get pissed off about stuff. The way their avatars + word balloons pop up and stream past kinda makes the whole thing comical. Like its a charade of people in a virtual play.

Not only that, you can put it a username and start digging to see if he/she has ever used any swear words. Pretty damn fun. Built by @richardhenry.

Twitter Venn: Visualizing the Relationship Between Words

tweeterism — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 01:52:34 +0000

Twitter Venn takes two or three search terms and creates a Venn Diagram showing the rate of tweets containing the search terms in the various combinations. A tag cloud can also be shown for one of the regions.

This is one of the more interesting Twitter visualization tools I’ve seen so far. It tracks the usage of specific words in relation to each other, which quite honestly, is a terrific asset for linguists and people interested in social language. At the bottom of the diagram is a constantly moving stream of tweets which include the words you’ve highlighted and its quite an interesting way to pick up on random opinions featuring specific keyterms.

Have a go at it yourself. And if you’re interested in data visualization in general, don’t forget to check out Jeff Clark’s portfolio as well. Great stuff there.

Twistori: An ending stream of Twitter intimacy

tweeterism — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 18:29:52 +0000

The public display of emotions has increased in the digital age. It’s all so accelerated nowadays. Words and individual expression come pouring out like water into the ears of anyone who is willing to hear, even when there is no intended audience. Twitter is like blogs on steroids when it comes to sharing of individual feelings on just every topic, no matter how trivial or important.

Twistori is a site that captures the thoughts, feelings and hopes of twitter users. It pulls tweets containing the words love, hate, think, believe, feel and wish and displays them in an unending stream. It’s very addictive to watch, perhaps partly because its all anonymous. The tweets are not linked to the specific user, although you could easily do a search to find out who they are.

I like the sense of intimacy, kinda like a confessional.. with everyone speaking at once.