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Twitter, for all its fans and detractors, generates a LOT of data.  It may only be a very small percentage of the world’s population who tweet a lot, but even that can be representative of interesting/important trends and changes.

Oh, and by the way, is twitter worried about this twitter.com traffic trend (courtesy of compete.com)?

But in terms of mining the human chatter that happens through Twitter, who is doing anything interesting?  I didn’t find much:

1. TweetDeck‘s  TwitScoop

Dodgy naming aside, this column in tweetdeck is one I keep switched on.  But a keyword tag cloud isn’t exactly world-shattering in 2010.  Still, it’s there, and while the screengrab above doesn’t tell me much (and I’m still not sure what/who “snead” is, even after a search), it’s a good finger-on-the-pulse.

2. TrendsMap

Now this is more like it (and a better name).  A google mashup with (another) tag/word cloud floated on top, it gives an overview or trending topics, along with a real-time snapshot of individual tweets.   And no, I’ve no idea why blasphemy is a hot topic in Ireland right now…

 3. Neoformix

Now this guy I have a lot of time for.  He’s particularly well known for his “Twitter Stream” graphs, which shows word usage trends over time, as below. 

However, head on over to his projects page, and you’ll find charts that include “time of day word correlations” (as below), “Twitter Venn” (twitter Venn diagrams) and a host of other tools. 

So, I know Jeff at Neoformix isn’t the only guy doing interesting analysis of Twitter data, but what surprises me is how few people seem to be working on it – at least that I’m aware of.  Sure, the fact that the word “drunk” is tweeted most between midnight and 5am isn’t going to change the way we see the world – but what about if a brand name suddenly takes off?  Or the word “recession” is on a downwards trend, or “flu” on an upwards trend? 

More Twitter Mining, please…