Emily Chang - News: Twitterverse Launches

twittering: @rule29 i'm voting for obama b/c i believe in his core philosophies, his values, and the proposals he articulates (see his site for issues).

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Monday, April 09, 2007

Twitterverse Launches

Ideacodes is pleased to launch our first release of Twitterverse, a mashup and a visualization layer that mines and archives the public timeline of Twitter and provides a visualization of the most commonly used words in a given time period. Twitter, the hot new product by Obvious, is a “sophisticated, device-agnostic, social message routing system that nobody realizes they need until they try it,” as Biz Stone so aptly described. Twitter has rightly taken the web and blog communities by storm in the last month.

We’re self-proclaimed Twitter addicts. It’s given us a glimpse into the lives of so many and let us share those moments in time, both mundane and magnificent, that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. Where blogging gave us a similar connection to the thoughts of individuals worldwide, Twitter is capturing these little moments in time - much like a photograph momentarily stops and captures time visually. This power to make the invisible, visible, is something that’s always intrigued us regardless of the medium. These moments show us that our thoughts and actions are interwoven and unique, and that our desire to stay within each other’s attention periphery is what makes us human. The 140 character format of Twitter also lends itself to a specific style of prose or poetry that readily displays one’s personality.

As soon as we got on Twitter, our first thought was, “what’s everybody on Twitter doing?” We wanted to see a visualization that showed text/content overlaps and popular words used by people over any timeframe. In the spirit of Hackers and Painters, we threw together a mashup to show this view into the content.

Read more about our motivations behind Twitterverse in our blog post.