I just received an interesting tweet about this new story on the Harvard Business Review.
Jeff Clark, a ‘data visualisation enthusiast’, that is, a person who ‘interprets computer data in a visually compelling manner’ (2010), has ‘built four applications to visualise the giant pile of data on Twitter. These applications auto-search words used in tweets, then look for relationships with other words or with other tweeters – in real time’ (2010).
TwitterVenn ‘allows you to enter three search terms, returning a venn diagram showing frequency of use of each term and frequency of overlap of the terms in a single tweet’ (2010).
Twitter Spectrum ‘lets you compare two similar search terms and shows which words are most commonly associated with each term and which words are most commonly used in tweets with both terms’ (2010).
TwitArcs requires you to ‘type in a tweeter’s handle and it returns a stream of that person’s tweets with arcs that link common words between tweets (on the right) and common re-tweeters (on the left)’ (2010).
StreamGraph ‘returns the frequency of the most common words associated with a single search item for the last 1000 tweets, by visualising a literal flow of conversation’. This is ‘useful for Account Planners, Brand Managers and PR pros, or for anyone looking to better track and monitor Twitter conversations around particular brands or topics’ (2010).
Of all the functions in Twitter, one of my favourites is topic trending. This allows you to find out which are the topics that are being talked about most on Twitter, and generally, that reverberates the most talked-about topics worldwide.
If you need to quantify these tweets, for example, such as the most talked-about games at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics or any discussion about the medal tally, and number-crunching is not your thing, these four applications can reveal a visual map – a picture does say a thousand words (and numbers) – of the results to date.
Granted, it will be some way before everyday users become conversant enough with this technology to drive real-world business results but I would say we have definitely hit the tweet spot, in demonstrating that Twitter is not merely a dud trend, it actually has legs to become a quantifiable measurement tool for businesses.
Image Source:
References:
Harvard Business Review, Four ways of looking at Twitter, viewed 24 February 2010, http://blogs.hbr.org/research/2010/02/visualizing-twitter.html
Neoformix, Welcome to my weblog, viewed 24 February 2010, http://neoformix.com/2006/WelcomeToMyWeblog.html
