If you can analyze a bunch of tweets, what would you like to find?
I found a utility to back up my tweets called bmtu. It is a pretty cool python program and I have been using it for a while. If you are not into python and would like to get a Windows executable, send me an email and I will be happy to send it to you.
This program (bmtu) not only lets me back up my tweets but also save Tweet Streams of other people. So I picked a few influencers in the industry and saved their tweets as well. Each tweetstream goes into an sqlite database. I have been doing this for a few months.
I have a few ideas on analyzing these tweets. I may build a few of these (if I can’t find other programs to do this).
- I would like to take my twitter stream, extract all the links and stick them in a social bookmarking site like delicious.com (I use Twitter as a bookmarking service. However, since it is not easy to locate tweets beyond three days, I would rather have them on a social bookmarking site where they can be shared and tagged by any one).
- I would like to parse the text in the tweets, remove the common words and create a vocabulary (this may require a couple of iterations to remove noise but in the end should give me a nice vocabulary of my tweet-o-sphere).
- Take 2 one step further and create a tag cloud and link them to the tweets (we have already built some kind of linked tag clouds and find them pretty useful).
- I would like to repeat 1-3 with the tweets of some of the people I follow – you can guess where I am going with this.
- I would like to create an ontology of topics in my tweets. It is easier said than done. Even though the starting point for this comes from 2 and 3, I need to process them a bit more and consolidate them.
- I would like to find out which topics get more retweets than others. This will give me a sense of what my readership likes.
- I would like to find out my own retweet patterns. What do I retweet most? Who do I retweet? What topics do I tend to favor? Are these the same topics that I tweet about?
- I would like to find some propagation patterns. For example how many people who retweet my tweets are not directly following me?
- What percentage of my tweets get retweeted? What percentage of links I post, get read?
- I follow some thought leaders like Tim O’Reilly who tracks alpha-geeks. I want to see a timeline of his tweet topics and get a sense of where he thinks the industry is moving.
What about you? What would you like to know about your tweets and the ones you follow?