Explore Twitter Lists

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Sat, 30 Apr 2011

It has been very gratifying to see the interest in my recently launched Tweet Topic Explorer. In the week since it was made available there have been posts about it on Infosthetics, FlowingData, Cool Infographics, and many other places. It has also had over 1,200 tweets sent about it. Thank you everyone for trying it out and telling your friends!

Much of the initial attention came from people in Europe looking at non-English accounts. The tool was enhanced a few days after launch to ignore stop words in German, Italian, Spanish, French, and Dutch. It's not a perfect implementation and of course misses many common languages but it does make the tool more useful for many more people.

Another request for improvement that I was able to deliver was the capacity to analyze the tweets from Twitter Lists. You can now enter a list name in the field to see a Word Cluster Diagram for the latest tweets from the people on the list. The volume of tweets on a list is usually pretty high so the last 800 tweets (which is how many are used by the tool) will not go very far back in time. When using the Tweet Topic Explorer with a list the tweets on the right are enhanced to include the account and icon for the author of each tweet.

Here is the result for the Twitter List @Top100In/DataVis:

And here are a few others without the tweet list shown. @mashable/marketing:

And @Scobleizer/iphone-and-ipad:

 


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