Graph Your Tweets with Twitter Charts

Over the last year or so I have become addicted to data visualization and mashup tools. Every day it seems like there's a new one to explore. My current favorite remains PageAddict. Using the Firefox plug-in I have been able to reduce my time on social networks and increase my use of productivity apps. Now I have a new one that's equally revealing.

Twitter Charts is a Yahoo Pipes/Google Charts mashup that takes a user's tweets and plots them on timeline by day of the week and by hour. It's a great way to see just how active a user is on Twitter and when. In addition, it also gives you a sense for how engaged an individual user is in the conversation by revealing the portion of tweets that are replies.

To give you a sense for the differences between Twitter users below are two graphs. The first plots my tweets. The second graphs my friend Robert Scoble's tweets. As you can see there's quite a difference in how we use Twitter. Additional information on Twitter Charts can be found here. (Via Twitterholics)

Comments

[JoeHageOnline.com]

Steve, I found you from a Brogan tweet.

Thanks for this. It goes part of the way to answering a question I have.

I want to know what time of day a URL is most likely to be clicked through. Found any apps to determine that?

Thanks,Joe Hage

[Marc Vermut]

Joe,

Tweetburner provides some URL clickthrough data on their shortened links. Details include clicks in first and most recent 24 hours, so theoretically, you could just continually revisit for fresh data.

You may have to register for this advanced functionality.

marc

[Damon Cortesi]

Hi Steve,

I've got a slightly more colorful version of this on my site, http://tweetstats.com

You can check out your stats here: http://tweetstats.com/graphs/steverubel

(note that there's a small gap because Twitter started restricting to archives back in June)

[Eric Schwartzman]

Steve,

You're definitely onto something.

I just got back from Asia where I trained roughly 200 civil servants on social media. They're anxious to integrate social media into their outreach efforts, but they're concerned about losing the illusion of control, creating forums for dissent and keeping up with the demands of original content creation.

The international edition of Newsweek has a cover story this week blaming the current economic crisis of Greenspan, but the reason for that blame is unexpected.

According to Paul Kedrosky, who wrote the article, Greenspan is to blame for championing the internet as a tool to foster economic growth. Much as Gladwell pointed out in his article about the business media's inability to see the Enron fiasco coming, Kedrosky says that the availability of excessive information online is inadequate for helping people to monitor activity, because the information is too spread out, and too complex.

He says "We need something that lets us know more than the balance of our 401(k)s, something that connects us to the ebb and flow of live financial markets around the world. It wouldn't be hard. No new technology is required—people just need to demand it (loudly). All that is required is our active interest in making sure that the world doesn't come down around our ears. We are part of this system, and we need a window into it."

It made me think about Megan's List, a high-traffic CA state government website that is relevant and useful on an ongoing basis without surrendering the conversation, and without requiring any original content creation to do so. Megan's Law makes it easy for people to access and visualize existing data.

Data visualization could be a low-risk engagement strategy for those organizations that aggregate useful, proprietary data. And it may be particularly useful for those who are unable to see the value in tolerating disparate points of view on their own websites.

Wired ran a cover story about the end science in June, saying science is all theory, and theory is being replaced with research. But getting your arms around and processing excessive data is not a layman's task, and free text analysis requires serious software tools to leverage effectively. Simplicity is very complex.

Is data visualization going to emerge as the next hot channel for engaging audiences, and if it does, will we need a web 2.0 or open source solution that makes it easy to create simple data visualization charts?

What do you think?

Best,

Eric

[Torley]

Thx for sharing these tools.

What's the proper name for the chart images shown in Steve's post? With the dots that represent different sizes... I'm not aware yet. I think it's a type of "bubble chart". :)

[JudiWunderlich]

Steve -

Thank you so much for not only this tidbit, but all the others I've read from you since I started following you on Twitter and on your blog!