Yovav (Jay) Meydad's Personal Blog

Ideacodes (Emily Chang) released a new project called Twitterverse. It lets you explore what people twitter about in a time frame (1, 5, 10, 24 hours) and display a tag cloud of the most interesting words. Once you see the list you could zoom in and see the full context inside the messages and the members who sent them.

Twitter is an amazing social phenomenon. It is also a business that I can not really figure out (how are they planning to make money if they have to buy huge amounts of bulk text messages?).

I find the Twitterverse mashup interesting as it provides a unique point of view on the lives of those who use the service especially on thier language:

• Vocabulary is fairly limited. Only 1049 words were used by the community in the last 24 hours. One caveat – not all words sent are added to the index.
• “Twitter”, “Going” and “Work” were the most popular in the last 24 hours. Does it mean people twitter a lot when they are going to work?!
• Twitter is more than just a site/product/brand. It is at the point that it turned to a verb (embody verb potential) and have spawned words like: tweet, tweets, twit, twitter, twittering, twitterrific, twitters, twittervision

I am sure one day someone will make this the topic of his Linguistic thesis.

Just added AddThis, the popular social bookmarking aggrigation service, to my blog.