According to a recent Mashable article, almost 70% of adults in the US don't know enough about Twitter to "have an opinion" about it. Even so, its popularity continues to grow and so do tools to measure it, complete with data visualizations to tell stories about these measurements. In this post, I'll cover a few of the ones I've been monitoring lately.
Twitalyzer measures traffic based on usernames (i.e. @kanarick) and defines derived values such as brand Strength, Signal, Favor, Passion and Clout based on that traffic. They also use globally aggregated data to create interesting lists such as the 100 most influential Twitterers. (Is 'Twitterer' a word?)
Open Brands, a service of Earthsite Labs, is a user-created directory of over 300 brands, which they call "Brand Channels," using the Twitalyzer measurements on both usernames and hashtags for slightly different results.
Along with content, a user's network is another slice of the Twitter ecosystem. TwitterFriends is a good stab at creating visualizations and data analysis of a network's shape and size. Here you can see some of the results of analyzing social media blogger, Dave Armano's network.
TweetEffect charts how a network changes in size between tweets, suggesting that you might find a pattern between what you tweet and how many people start or stop following you. I'm not convinced that any singular tweet really changes the size of your network, unless you specifically ask people to pass something on.
Blending a part of the real-time twitter stream with an artistic lens can create both beautiful and informative experiences that evolve over time. One of the best examples of this is well-known Twistori, an elegant unfolding experience of animated tweets that contain the words love, hate, think, believe, feel or wish. It makes a great screensaver and is never dull.
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