Twitter content contains an enormous wealth of mood and sentiment. So many useful techniques for mapping this are coming online. Having looked at Twistori, Twist and some of the geo mapping technology out there I see a commercial product combining elements from all three which supports marketing and product development strategies.
JP floated a beautiful Twitter experiment called Twistori across my screen this morning - an anonymous stream of Twitter consciousness around the phrases “I Feel” “I Wish” “I Love” etc.,
Based on the We Feel Fine project, Twistori is an art installation and another example of the power of different visualisation techniques. Twistori appeals warmly to the right side of my brain.
With the right content, Apple’s RSS Visualizer screensaver in OS X can be mesmerising, but the Twistori screensaver may be a new favourite.
The creators of Twistori (husband and wife team Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs) are tight-lipped about next steps - claiming Twistori’s future path is “not unclear”. They seem happy for Twistori to be art rather than commerce.
So I started looking for another angle. Twistori led me quickly to a less beautiful, but no less useful product named Twist. More a Google analytics style trend analysis for Twitter, Twist supports relative trend searches (Twitter vs. Facebook; Nikon vs. Canon etc.)
Trend analysis (instances) alone (”Obama”) is less useful without sentiment (”I love/don’t love Obama”), but perhaps there is a future for these products where the beauty and the mood elements from Twistori can be aligned with the quantitative analysis of a tool like Twist.
Add in geomapping functionality (like that coming out of the Poly9 studio in Quebec) and you start to create a critical component of a marketing/PR/product strategy toolset.
These were the first three providers of this type I found this morning. I’m sure there are already many more. I’ll continue to search for them. If you have already found them, please let me know in the comments field.