Twitter’s cool, no doubt, but what enhances its coolness are the applications developing in the periphery, all of which seem to extract from Twitter’s deep reservoirs of cool and redistribute along the Internet. Recently, Twellow and Summize have surfaced. Before that it was TwittEarth, which lets you be a giant fly on the wall of the world.
The latest in Twitter cool is Twitscoop, which uses an algorithm to crawl tweets in real time and present keywords in an evolving tag cloud. The words swelling the most reflect the words most used this moment among Twitterers.
At first, Twitscoop seems like a robotic, digital real time version of MadLibs. Random words in alphabetical order forming curious phrases like “choose cloud conditioning,” if you’re a linear type, or “focus, hire incoming nerds,” if you’re more of a hunter-gatherer type.
Just words, as you might imagine, aren’t always useful. However, a mouseover reveals the magic. Hover over a tag and Twitscoop shows the tweets with those words in them, allowing for some real context. The giant “docs” tag, for example, shows that at 12:32 PM EDT, Google Docs is down, according to 41 current tweets.
To the right of the cloud, Twitscoop shows the “Hot Trends.” Currently, Google Docs is topping the list, followed by Firewire’s new Drobo, 3D web browsing app Vivaty for Facebook and AIM, Iran and Tel Aviv, et cetera.
Those hot topics sort of let you know who uses Twitter the most, too, don’t you think?
The coolest thing about Twitscoop is the real time breaking information, just as the name of the application implies. Twitter was thought to be a great source for breaking news from its inception, but Twitscoop pulls all that breaking news into one place.
Hat tip to David Risley.
