My Twitter life, as a Wordle

I’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: