Will the useful and interactive Twitter applications never stop? Thanks to the wonderful Twitterholics website, I just discovered TweetWheel.
This online application analyzes all of the followers we have and then identifies which of them in turn follow one another. In other words, this visually shows relationships between those people I follow. Bring the cursor over each name, and colored lines appear that link them to one another based on their relationships. While some relationships I know, a number of them were a surprise. As followers and relationships are dynamic while the TweetWheel takes a snapshot in time, you may want to generate this repeatedly. One word of caution, depending on the number of people you follow, this can take some time. As I have recently added a number of new people I follow (from the Connected Futures CP2tech01 workshop), this program helps me understand those people’s relationships a little better.
Click my TweetWheel image to see it full-size.
What community-building or other uses can you imagine for this?
Nice description and interesting tool. I think if a person/group were intentional about relationship building they could use Twitter as a networking tool AND this little app could be an interesting and useful way to reflect and self-assess linkages and connections. I wonder, when doing an online workshop over a period of weeks or months, this could be a tool to “see” the linkages emerge, like 6 degrees in action, yes?
LaDonna, this sounds like an interesting possibility. I wonder what this would look like from the CP2tech01 or SCoPE Twitter accounts?
TwitterWheel is kewl! Is it a bug that not all of the arcs show up, or is tat the Twitter API timing out?
The TwitterWheel I have above is a screenshot of when I ran this, so everything there should be accurate. However, Twitter has been timing out today, among other issues. If you run this right now, you may very well have an API issue.