Twitter Clouds – What Do You Write About?

What do you write about?

Tweet Clouds, an created by John Krutsch and Jared Stein, lets you answer that question.

The tool creates a “tag cloud” – a visual representation of what you write about – for your Twitter posts. More common words are displayed in a larger font, so it’s easy to see your popular topics (or someone else’s).

Tweet Clouds allows you to include two-word phrases, which is a nice touch and adds a bit of context (“social media” appears a lot in my cloud, for example). For a little extra spice, Tweet Clouds also lets you add your del.icio.us bookmarks, so it shows you both what you write about and what you’re interested in- a nice touch.

Tweet Cloud - Dave Fleet

How is this useful?

I know that a few of my Twitter friends have been a little disturbed recently by “creepy” people they don’t know following them on Twitter. This provides a neat way to find out what those “creepy” people write about before defaulting to the “block” button. I’d love to see something like this accessible from peoples’ Twitter pages – it would make the decision of whether to follow them much easier.

For me, it’s cute but I’m not sure of any other uses. Perhaps if you could plug other sites into it and get a picture of your overall social media presence…

What do you think? Do you see any other uses for Tweet Clouds or is this just another neat tool that you look at once then never use again?

Dave Fleet
Managing Director and Head of Global Digital Crisis at Edelman. Husband and dad of two. Cycling nut; bookworm; videogamer; Britnadian. Opinions are mine, not my employer's.