A post from Martin Weller put me onto Tweet Clouds – a new tag cloud generating service for twitter. As someone who uses twitter mainly for work purposes I was curious to see what kind of cloud my account would generate. As expected (particularly after a relatively heavy twitter session at the OAI-ORE open day on Friday) there are a lot of “resources” and “aggregations” in my cloud:-)
I’m not sure just how much of a gimmick this is and just how useful it is to have another view on what you are writing about. As Martin points out the addition of more filtering and links would certainly help. But I think because I twitter in bursts at selected times, it may well be of more value to someone like me than a more regular twitter user as any clouds I generate might be a bit more focussed. Then again, for a more regularly user it may well be useful to get an overview of what you have been talking about . . . or is it just another ‘neat’ web 2.0 application that you use once, smile at the results and never use again?
Thanks for the link, Sheila, that’s quite a sweet little tool; I do agree with your thoughts on its real value but at least it’s fun 🙂 I also really like Tweet Scan http://www.tweetscan.com/index.php, the search tool Twitter really needed.
Hi Sheila,
Congrats on your new position at CETIS by the way!
I haven’t started using twitter yet, but I just love the name, especially when I read sentances like yours: “I twitter in bursts at selected times.” I’m sure we all do…
And a Tweet Cloud sounds to me like an episode of the clangers, I will have to investigate more.
On a similar note to Twittering, despite the amount of scepticism I come across in articles about Facebook, I’m really loving the Facebook status updates, a great way of keeping in touch with friends and finding out all sorts of things. As I’ve only been on Facebook for less than a year, it’s been really interesting to watch certain patterns emerging in the updates around certain times, e.g. a lot of people grumbling about the long dark days of the winter, which I feel leads to the individual feeling part of a collective consciousness (to paraphrase Jung’s notion of the collective subconscious…)
Vashti
I personally don’t put a ton of stock in tag clouds in general, but John Krutsch is actually committing his mental resources to making TweetClouds.com far more valuable in terms of real data and comparing data.
Thats a really good idea! Tag clouds can be really powerful when executed correctly.