Oke, this is fun. Just found this nice project by Chad Scira, tweet cloud. It looks like many of the people I know on Twitter have also found it today. The service Chad developed allows you to create a tag cloud of your twitter messages, showing the words you used most. It is interesting to note that the service can analyze up to a year of tweets if you like. This allows it to make a solid tweet tag cloud, showing some of your ‘Twitter personality’. The created cloud has a nice design too, which is one of things I like about it, see below.
Cloud created with Chad Scira's tweet cloud project. This 'large' cloud is based on my tweets of the last six months
I did some Googling to see if there are more services like this. I found, for instance, My Tweet Cloud. It only creates clouds of the hash-tags you used in your tweets. Although I can understand that hash-tags usually have bigger importance, since not everybody is using hash-tags as extensively the cloud can miss out on important words. Thinking of this, it might be a good idea to mix-in non-hash tag words, but at the same time give hash tag words a higher weighting. (Or, vice-versa, mix in hash tag words in case of Chad’s service.)
The design of the cloud created by My Tweet Cloud is more simplistic, but that’s compensated by the option to export the hash-tag cloud to Wordle which creates awesome cloud designs. For fun I made a Wordle cloud based on the words Chad’s service found (without the word weighting), see the result below.
The same tweet cloud (without word weighting) created using Wordle. Wordle has many styling options this is just one example.
Another service I found that allows you to make personal tweet tag clouds is ouTWIT Me. Unfortunately it only allows you to make a cloud based on your last 20 tweets, which is in my opinion to few to create a cloud that gives a good overview of what you tweet about. The created cloud is shown as a nice Adobe Flash animation, based on the WP-Cumulus tag cloud Wordpress plug-in.
There also is a Wordpress plug-in called Tweet Cloud. I took a look at its PHP code and found it only uses your last 20 tweets. You can of course tweak the code to use more tweets, but I can imagine it would increase the load time of your blog if you do so.
It would be great if Chad would distribute his service through a Wordpress plugin, e.g. updating once a week, doing the required processing and mark-up at his server’s side. For bloggers it could be a nice personal addition next to the usual blog tag cloud. For Chad’s tweet cloud project it could imply knowing what bloggers are about, which in turn can be transformed into a search service… like Tim O’Reilly said in 2005 about Web2.0 : Data is the new Intel inside. Why not apply it here?
Tags: hash tags, tag cloud design, tweet cloud, twitter, wordpress
