Twitterverse Helps Track Twitter Conversations

Posted on April 10, 2007

Ideacodes has announced the launch of their new Twitter mashup tool called Twitterverse. Twitterverse is an interesting tool that displays keywords that people have been discussing recently on Twitter in an easy-to-read tag cloud layout. The words in larger fonts are the keywords that Twitter users have been entering the most.

In its current form, Twitterverse displays popular words based on time and popularity. We're pulling data every minute from the public timeline RSS feed as it updates.

The data is parsed by word match, eliminating certain types of words, and a script generates the cloud based on time frame and popularity. We'll be adjusting the algorithm frequently as we get more data, as well as limiting out certain words (or display names). For now, words are displayed based on being repeated a certain number of times during the specified timeframe.

Even at this basic level, you can start to get a sense of our collective activity and the general zeitgeist of the day. For example, since we cleared our test data and started re-collecting data off the public timeline on Sunday, April 8 at 5:40pm PST, we started to see a shift from people twittering about "easter" early in the day to a growing number of people twittering about "sopranos" as the night progressed. You can imagine checking in daily to see what topics arise.

On Twitterverse you can see the top topics for the last hour, the last 5 hours, the last ten hours and for the previous day. We already mentioned today on our Twitter page that lunch and coffee are two of the more frequently discussed topics. Other popular keywords include going, listening, meeting, office, reading, sleep, wondering and working. You can also find discussion of current topics such as the latest film. For example, some twits have been discussing the film Grindhouse. It will be interesting to see what happens on Twitterverse when there is a big breaking news event. Twitterverse also provides a search tool that includes data from Sunday, April 8, 2007 to the present. The search tool will be useful for finding conversations about a particular subject and for ego searches.