Discovering the uses of Twitter might also lead you to discover things about yourself and your interests. The information you send and receive through Twitter can be manipulated in ways that reveal patterns about your usage patterns, and what kinds of ideas you like to explore. Take this post from Tim O’Reilly, for example.
Tim used Wordle (which Dean alluded to earlier in the course) to create a word cloud of his tweet stream by copying the text straight from his twitter feed and pasting it into the Wordle input box.
The result was a collection of words that reflected Tim’s common ideas and thoughts, familiar people and even his usage style of Twitter. Based on his findings he described Twitter as a “reflection of a community of shared minds, rather than of shared ideas.” Commonality between people’s Twitter feeds may reflect similar ways of thinking and the possibility to find like-minded people.
I thought this was a creative way to use online tools in combination, and it shows how integrating them can lead to interesting results that may not have otherwise been visible.
Those who have used Twitter for a while will likely have racked up a sizeable number of tweets on your homepage. Give this a try and see if you learn anything about your Tweeting habits!
Try this on your homepage, which shows you the tweets of those you follow, and also on your own twitter feed. What kinds of patterns and connections do you see?
Note: You can use “find and replace” in a word processor to get rid of common words that take up unnecessary space (to do this, find the words you want to exclude and replace them with a space or a period).
I made a word cloud out of the last 12 hours of my Twitter home page:
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