I used the Classifier4J Summarizer to summarize the tweets and pick out the 5 tweet summary of the period, and the 1 tweet summary of @ replies and non-directed tweets.
Only letters and spaces were kept for the summary (thus each tweet was treated as one sentence), the summarizer transforms everything to lower case and removes some things like the identifier on bitl.y and other short links.
For this one, I’m having a little fun, really. Essentially I’ve tried to summarize 2 months of Twitter for each user on a slide, hence the inclusion of their pic (as of now, unfortunately not at the time period covered).
Continued on from Part 5, exploring what they are saying using the Phrase Net visualization from Many Eyes.
Each image is a link to the applet where you can explore the text and interact with it. Change the linking word on the left – I’ve used space, but “and” or “is” in particular could be enlightening.
I like this visualization because it shows what goes together. The fact that “globe” and “mail” are linked by “and” is perhaps not unexpected, but what does “Google” link to? News? Facebook? Buzz? What do these link to in turn – privacy? Social networking?
I loathe email as a form of communication, I do. Having an iPhone has not made me any better at dealing with it, in fact it has made things worse – I can now monitor it in dead time and if there’s nothing urgent then there’s no need to actually check my email.
So, if I can’t reply in 3 sentences or less it waits until I next attack my inbox. I have a goal of once a week, but there are always more interesting things to do so once a month is around average. Normally after I’ve completed something significant I’ll look at my overflowing inbox and try and make some inroads. The thing I use my iPhone for most w.r.t. email? Deleting it.
A truly urgent email that requires me to use a computer might get a response within 3 days. I know, this seems unreasonable and honestly, I don’t get that much email compared to some people. The point is, I get more than I want.
Credit: flickr / Will Lion
Two summers ago, I quit Facebook, didn’t have a cellphone, and only checked email once a week. The effect on my productivity was phenomenal. That was when I created much of the material and ideas that became my programming curriculum that was taught across the US and that I taught in Shanghai. These ideas have since evolved further to and I created this workshop. I’m hankering for another such period of freedom from electronic communication, but I’m not sure I could give up Twitter. Note – my job at that time was extremely social, so it wasn’t like I had become actually reclusive, just electronically so.
Honestly, I think the reason I hate email so much is that primarily what I receive are requests to do things. It’s also more intrusive than the forms of communication I prefer (blogs via RSS, and Twitter) – someone who has my email address can subscribe me to the mailing list for their latest project (grr), they can’t force their content into my Google Reader. The 140 character restriction on a Tweet forces a more to-the-point communication style. Scheduling things, despite the fact that I make my calendar accessible, is something of a nightmare.
And – email is private. For some things, that is totally appropriate and I do love receiving emails from friends as it feels more personal than a Facebook wall post (even if I don’t demonstrate this with a prompt reply). However when I chat on sametime with one of my mentors, Sacha, it often seems to evolve into a blogpost for one, or both of us. Which is great – because then other people who weren’t part of the conversation can participate too and learn from what we’re sharing.
Ultimately, I know I’m going to have to keep using email. I know I can find ways to manage it better – unsubscribe from things aggressively, get blog comments in my RSS reader instead, aggregate my accounts in gmail and use the filtering there.
But – I’ll be honest – I’d probably prefer to hear from you by other means. But, before I sound too anti-social, obnoxious, and ungrateful… it’s really nice to hear from you at all. So if you loathe Twitter, email can be our compromise. Just don’t tell the people asking me for things.
Continued on from Part 4, exploring what they are saying using Word Trees on Many Eyes.
Each image is a link to the applet where you can explore the text and interact with it. Change the word in the top left corner to change the root of the tree.
In which we answer the question – what are they saying?
I’ve split the tweets up into two types – at replies, and not at replies, and a third which contains all tweets. I’ve created wordles of each one, for each of the 20 people we were following.
If you haven’t – check out wordle.net. It’s awesome.
There’s debate as to whether wordles are good ways to analyze text – definitely there are better ways (possibly to be explored in a future post) however I think they’re cool and here they have some utility. Note, though, that sizes of word are relative to the number of words in the data set for that individual, which are of varying size (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).
I don’t want to tread on Caitlin’s analysis (I’m just the data junkie), but some things you can see, aside from topics of discussion:
People who make a point of thanking others (most likely for retweets or similar)
People who retweet things that others have said about them
Where RT is conspicuous by it’s absence
Specific websites that get tweeted a lot
My personal favorite is Dave Winer’s all tweets! Let me know what you think.
Alex Howard all Tweets
Alex Howard at Replies
Alex Howard not Directed
Alfred Hermida all Tweets
Alfred Hermida at Replies
Alfred Hermida not Directed
Andrew Keen all Tweets
Andrew Keen at Replies
Andrew Keen not Directed
Cody Brown all Tweets
Cody Brown at Replies
Cody Brown not Directed
Dan Gillmor all Tweets
Dan Gillmor at Replies
Dan Gillmor not Directed
Dave Winer all Tweets
Dave Winer at Replies
Dave Winer not Directed
David Cohn all Tweets
David Cohn at Replies
David Cohn not Directed
David Eaves all Tweets
David Eaves at Replies
David Eaves not Directed
Dr. Mark Drapeau all Tweets
Dr. Mark Drapeau at Replies
Dr. Mark Drapeau not Directed
Howard Weaver all Tweets
Howard Weaver at Replies
Howard Weaver not Directed
Jay Rosen all Tweets
Jay Rosen at Replies
Jay Rosen not Directed
JD Lasica all Tweets
JD Lasica at Replies
JD Lasica not Directed
Jeff Jarvis all Tweets
Jeff Jarvis at Replies
Jeff Jarvis not Directed
Jennifer Preston all Tweets
Jennifer Preston at Replies
Jennifer Preston not Directed
Kirk LaPointe all Tweets
Kirk LaPointe at Replies
Kirk LaPointe not Directed
Mark Glaser all Tweets
Mark Glaser at Replies
Mark Glaser not Directed
Mathew Ingram all Tweets
Mathew Ingram at Replies
Mathew Ingram not Directed
Steve Buttry all Tweets
Steve Buttry at Replies
Steve Buttry not Directed
Steve Outing all Tweets
Steve Outing at Replies
Steve Outing not Directed
Steve Yelvington all Tweets
Steve Yelvington at Replies
Steve Yelvington not Directed
Programming-wise, the code is trivial because wordle accepts free text. But, before I realized that the guy who wrote wordle was much smarter than me, I tried to be clever an optimize it by using a LinkedHashSet. I chose this data structure on the basis that – I wanted O(1) random access (the hash) because I would find the same words repeated, only one instance of each word (the set) and a nice quick iteration (the linked) so I could output a key, value table at the end. And then I discovered that there was no get() or elementAt() method – and stopped trying to be a smart-alec!
