I joined Twitter on January 13th of 2007 and to date I have posted a total of 8,134 tweets. I've shared my many thoughts, opinions, links, personal feelings and interests with my followers over the years. The reality is, Twitter has been my main vehicle to express myself, share my life with others and learn and grow from the wisdom and support of those I follow in return.
Since Twitter has been my main outlet and communication channel for quite some time now, I often wonder what my aggregated conversation looks like. Do my tweets over time reveal obvious patterns and common threads of opinion, interest and emotion. Well, of course they do, but I want a detailed report.
There are plenty of sites out there that allow you to generate "word clouds" from your latest tweets. These services aggregate, combine and arrange your most recent and frequent words posted to Twitter and visualize it back to you, revealing your most common and public thoughts, emotions and conversations. A good example of a word cloud generator is Wordle, which creates beautiful word clouds from any URL or RSS feed you enter.
Even though Wordle and sites like it are fun to play with, when it comes to looking at Twitter conversation I'm more interested in understanding the use of words over time. I think it is much more insightful and meaningful to analyze an entire year of someone's tweets, than it is to simply looking at the last week or so. Enter - a newly launched, more extensive Twitter word cloud generator by Chad Scira called Tweet Could. Tweet Cloud allows you to aggregate and display up to an entire year of tweets into a word cloud, giving you a comprehensive look at a year of your most frequent Twitter conversations.
As you can see from the word cloud below, some of my most frequent conversations included the words "thanks, love, follow, office, plane, fiesta and soho." I encourage you to check it out. I have found it to be quite telling and a pretty accurate representation of the last year of my life via Twitter.
