Visualizations: TweetClouds

Sam Lawrence (CMO for Jive Software, blogging at GoBigAlways), and a number of others on the twittersphere, have been producing visualizations (using "tag cloud" styling) around the "tweets" (maximum 140 character messages posted/sent on twitter.com) of themselves and other high-traffic twitter users.

Sam had been favoring the use of IBM's Many Eyes offering, which provides many ways to visualize information, but requires uploading of content to the service, for it to then chew on. The problem of that service was that the "easy" way to get information out of twitter and into Many Eyes involved cutting and pasting page after page of twitter text.

Noticed yesterday that Stowe Boyd gave tweetclouds.com a whirl, and while I had to hit the site multiple times (timed out, must be overloaded) for it to eventually load my twitter feed (pulled automatically, no cut and paste), it popped out the visualization below.

You can see the impact of the aggregation I'm doing by piping in various lifestreams (my listening habits in iTunes for example) and workstreams (posts to my blog) into my twitter account (via twitterfeed.com). There is also of course the bulk of twitter messages, which are manual tweets from me, responding to various people on twitter, posting open questions, etc..

Sadly this visualization doesn't do two word analysis, or it would be more obvious that "enterprise" and "2.0" are nearly always tied together in my tweets around "enterprise 2.0."

Interested in what anyone else thinks believes this visualization reveals about my twitter activities - too self-promoting? Too broad, too narrow?