Tweetclouds

I love tag clouds - I quite often type notes in a meeting and then pass them through a tag cloud generator and show them back to people. 'This is what we've been talking about apparently'.

I'm never entirely sure whether they offer some profound insight or are just a fun thing to do. So I was intrigued when I saw (via D'Arcy) that John Krutsch and Jared Stein had developed a clouder for Twitter. Simply enter your twitter name and it generates a tag cloud of the terms.

Here is mine: http://www.tweetclouds.com/user_pages/mweller.html

What does it tell you? Well that Tony is probably the person I do most replies to, that 'meeting' and 'watching' are two of my most common words, so I am usually either in a meeting or watching a film. That is largely true.

Like most tag clouds, it could probably do with some more filtering e.g. run and running are separate tags, so the prominence of the topic isn't accurately reflected. And if I was being really fussy, it would be nice to link to the tweets when you clicked on a word (although it does very usefully show you how many instances of that word were used currently). But it's another Twitter tool, and makes more sense to me than TwitterBlocks, which is pretty, but I don't know what it means.

Comments

[Sue Waters]

It now also has the option to remove the @replies which shows a different view of your tag clouds again.

[Sheila MacNeill]

Hi Martin

Thanks for that link! As an even less frequent user of twitter than my blog:-) I only really twitter when I'm at conferences etc that colleagues can't get to. Will be interesting to see if this doesn't develop more filtering links etc.

Cheers

Sheila

[5tein]

Thanks for the positive comments. We've had TweetClouds.com live for less than a week and are already experiencing server overload--that's a good thing, right?

This is John Krutsch's project, and the coolest thing is he sees TweetClouds as just a spring board for visualizing and mashing up all types of information. He's already got one sweet variation that we're testing out this week.

[Matt]

Very very interesting.

Can this be used on other content too ?

[5tein]

The latest v. of TweetClouds.com came out today, and it can mash-in your del.icio.us tags with your Twitter stream. You can also do 2 word phrases (based on frequency, currently) and toss in your own stop words.

I'll be working on a stop words modification in the coming days to meet some of the needs Martin has suggested, as well as others.

There are a few other really fun things in the works for TweetClouds as well--and some ideas that go beyond Tweets--but I don't want to spoil any possible surprise.