I love Twitter. Yes, it’s information overload and there’s a lot of noise, but I love the commentary and the interesting links. I also appreciate the updates from friends and family. More recently, I am loving the Twitter visualization sites that are popping up everywhere.
So, what the heck is a Twitter visualization? If you’re on Twitter, you know that there are millions of individual posts, replies, and discussions every day. Figuring that people out there would want to do things with this flowing data, Twitter publishes an API (application programming interface) that lets developers have real-time access to tweets and some user information. The result is hundreds (thousands?) of sites that let you search, map and analyze tweets, relationships between users, and topics. Here are some of my favorite Twitter visualization sites.
- Twistori is my favorite. Click on the words love, hate, think, believe, feel, wish and see a real-time stream of posts that contain these words in the tweet.
- WeFeelFine is a visualization of not just tweets, but blog posts and images as well. Explore Murmurs and see a flood of tweets with the words “I feel” in them.
- Twittervision shows tweets from around the world, overlaid on a world map so you know where the tweet are coming from. Twittervision is even available in 3D.
- Having an event? PepsicoZeitgeist shows real-time tweets about Internet Week in New York City. I especially love the top words from IWNY tweets.
- TweetStats lets you enter your Twitter username and see a bunch of statistics about your tweets, including when you tweet, average daily tweets, who you tend to retweet, etc.. Did you know all this about yourself?
- Twitter Friends Network Browser lets you see your Twitter network and click and drag to do fun things.
- Hashtags shows you the top hash tags on Twitter right now.
- MyTweetMap lets you see tweets from the people you are following, overlaid on a map.
- Dipity let you explore tweets in a timeline format but the site has since gone dark. Here’s a blog post that explores what happened to Dipity.
What’s fascinating to me is how Web designers and developers have found countless ways to transform the universe of Twitter data in new and different ways. Each site introduces me to new people to follow and gives me insight on new topics.
How about you? What are your favorite Twitter visualization sites?
6 replies on “My Favorite Twitter Visualization Sites”
Another really cool visualization that’s gaining traffic is the Fix Outlook movement: http://fixoutlook.org/ This visualization really shows the number of users signing up and spreading the word.
Hi Joanna, I thought I’d add to your list and flog our experiment here too. It’s called Tweetpond and you can access it at http://www.tweetpond.com/
Here’s a brief description: “Imagine an underwater world where fish are replaced with the latest thoughts from people all over the world. These thoughts fall deeper as they grow older and new ones are displayed on the top as people post them. This is Tweetpond, an ambient visualisation of Twitter.” I hope you enjoy it!
The following visualisations are pretty nifty too and well worth a try:
http://www.twittearth.com/
http://www.visibletweets.com/
http://www.twitterfall.com/
Cheers, Jussi (@jopas on Twitter)
Hei, have you seen the image visualization with twitter? its like watching tv: http://www.chrispie.com/labs/twitpic/
Check out http://www.jointheflutter.com and beat out your friends and colleagues with the biggest butterfly. There’s a contest going on until March for the most ‘Superfly’ tweeter.
[…] Visualization 101—Use tools like Paper.li, Storify, and these Twitter visualization tools to show students the difference between a Plain Jane Twitter feed and a Visualized Twitter feed. […]
Checkout pulsoviral.com, mainly used for events; but it works great on larger public screens.