I have to admit that I'm a fan of Twitter and have been using it quite a lot both as a communications platform AND a personal diary of what I'm doing that I care to share with the world - or just people who are following me tweets.
However, something about programs like Tweet Cloud bother me - it's the way data is being presented in alphabetical order rather than in importance.
For example, I write a lot about Social Networks in my Tweets, yet it's near the bottom because it starts with "S". To be sure, the sizes are bigger if there's more incidence of my using that word more often but a Twitter Stream Analysis like this one just tells me what I'm writing about, not the relationships of the topics - because how can it?
Personally, I see a lot of this stuff, Social Media Analytics (gee.. maybe I ought to coin that word and register a domain for it - ops! too late http://socialanalytics.com/ exists and has something on it).
Interesting - the company is in NYC and I'll contact them, but Social Analytics looks interesting - here's a clip from their website:
We help companies identify and communicate with the individuals who have the most influence in determining the success of the core activities of sales, marketing, and internal communication. We do this by using the power of social network analysis.
The world is a complicated place. People move in layered networks of complex relationships and interactions – at work, at home, online, by phone and by mail. But all of these networks have a few factors in common – groups of close friends or contacts, which operate mostly independently from other groups, with a few people acting as connectors between these disparate groups.
These connections between groups control the flow of information, moving new ideas from one group to another and influencing those they contact.
These connectors are the Influencers and the Information Gatekeepers in any network. As such they are critical to anyone who is trying to understand, influence or market in that network. These individuals make or break a marketing campaign, new product launch or change management effort. Social Analytics delivers these influencers to you.
To me, this kind of stuff is a lot more interesting an a cloud of Tweets that's alphabetical, but doesn't really tell me much. Twitter is full of that kind of stuff and people are writing more every day - and some of it might be useful, but most of it is getting lost in the clutter of applications that suddenly everyone who "Tweets" must look at.
I can't tell you how many of these i'm seeing every week - maybe two or three new ones are emerging.
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