So there are about 2 billion applications doing silly things with Twitter data. With millions of users monthly, there’s a ton of data to play with – and people are playing.
After going through about 30 of these applications this morning, I now have a much deeper respect for the Twitter folks and their ability to keep the wheels glued on their poor API-abused cart.
To follow up my “Twitter is a Sea of Market Research” post, I thought I’d highlight Twist. Twist is a simple data mining and comparison tool with a nice and easy to use UI. You simply type in some concepts and hit enter. The fact that they have a blue background and blue type for the keywords is a bit wonky, but here’s my results.
Here we see, concretely and without fear of popular reprisal, that Marx was wrong by a wide margin. Religion is not the opiate of the masses, bacon is.
At only two points over this week, bacon failed to trounce religion (and those were likely big sell off moments on the stock market).
From here, you can click to see discussions revealing exactly why bacon is so spiritually rewarding:
People seem to be talking about bacon every four minutes! That’s pretty cool if you happen to be a baconmonger.
When doing market research, you want 3 things:
- Unbiased reporting
- The ability to compare your data set to other data sets
- Some insight into “why” the person made this
Twist very quickly allows the users to search for and track trends of keywords, either alone or in comparison. After seeing the trends, users can look at exactly what people are saying.
Currently Twist does not let you save queries or make them at regular intervals. So if you’re doing the work, you have to go to the site daily.
But, hey, they just gave you a de-focused focus group of millions of people. What’ya want for your $0 expenditure?
Jim Benson is a partner at Modus Cooperandi and blogs at Evolving Web. Jim is a management consultant who uses social media tools and principles to help his clients communicate. Follow him on Twitter.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post! I am always happy to learn about useful tools especially when they are free. I would be curious to know what other Twitter tools you recommend for research.
Ahh! That’s the subject of future posts!
There is a new version of Twist out. There are some important improvements: the graph now shows the peaks, and you can see tweets for the topics displayed in the graph in the same page, without having to perform a search. This makes it very useful to find out WHY the topics are hot. They also display more data in the page, while still keeping the UI clean and easy to use.
Oh, and they seemed to have heard your complaint about the blue background, since they changed that to white!
Xtian,
Good info, thanks! One of the exciting thing about the Twitter apps is that they’re improving so fast.