My Twitter life, as a Wordle
Posted: May 5, 2009 Filed under: Food, Work | Tags: Food, Twitter, Wordle, Work 5 CommentsI’ve always wanted to generate a tag cloud of ALL my public Twitter posts. The problem is that most services, like TweetStats, will only take a small subset of the most recent posts to analyze. With the help of a great friend, Sacha Chua, who helped me scrape all 2000+ Twitter posts over the past few years (using Python and Perl scripts… stuff I don’t understand), I was able to create a word cloud via Wordle of all my public tweets:
Frankly, I was surprised tacos weren’t more prominent in that tag cloud. I see this mostly as a function that my priorities are misaligned. (Mental note: more tacos, less work). But Sacha also helped me do some other analyses too. Perhaps the most interesting is the break down of how many times I respond to certain people. Here’s list of the top 21 people I speak to most on Twitter:
89 @junkstar
56 @aneel
49 @elsua
41 @derekbaker
31 @edbrill
28 @turbotodd
27 @timwasher
23 @stevemann
23 @Macker
21 @tiffitis
20 @Scobleizer
20 @kid2dog
18 @sachac
18 @roonoid
18 @monkchips
18 @jenokimoto
18 @briancroxall
16 @ragtag
16 @jowyang
15 @wonderwebby
15 @shelisrael
Personally, I feel like I’ve gradually begun to use Twitter less and less as it’s gotten more popular. Call it the inverse Ashton Kutcher effect. But the tag cloud and @ list at least give a window of where I’ve spent a lot of my time over the past few years, what I’ve been talking about and who I’ve been spending it with.
Oh, and my first ever tweet? Appropriate:
Adam Christensen 
I’m surprised tacos isn’t top. And possibly the only time I will be level with jowyang when it comes to twitter.
Yeah, that was my big revelation. Look how huge IBM is compared to tacos. Something is off there.
And… you are more interesting than Jeremiah anyhow (shhhh… don’t tell him I said that).
Honestly every time I catch your tweets one always contains “I need a taco.”
BTW, we got a shout out for ibmevents on twitter last night – brands doing it right. http://bit.ly/16QXRS
Twitter may have value for those in the entertainment business (and their marketing overlords), but in my opinion, would be a useless waste of my time, either “tweeting” or reading.
It is destroying any inclination towards meaningful meaningful discourse, and dumbing the younger generation who embrace it.
Maybe I’m just an old curmudgeon, but you will never see me “thumbing” some breathless stream of consciousness blather about what I am doing at this very time.
Big Fella – yes, it can trend toward the pointless. But… that’s all dependent on the people whom YOU choose to follow. One person’s signal is another’s noise. For me, Twitter has helped me find better tasting tacos. Might be “breathless” to you, to me, that’s value because it’s what I care about.
It’s all about what YOU want to get out of it and who YOU want to follow. If you choose to follow and pay attention to Ashton Kutcher… well… that’s what you’ll get out of it.