Two 19-year olds at York University in the UK have just created what is perhaps the most powerful Twitter tool I have seen so far. Twitterfall is an ideal tool for tracking news via Twitter. It is a Twitter aggregator that not only tracks popular trends but which also allows you to create custom trends. Folks in the home office can now track news in real time for countries, outbreaks, natural disasters, etc. I’ve created a sample set of trends that you can see here:
And here is what I came up with:
While not necessarily headline news there is some interesting stuff that shows up. With a little tweaking and editing I am sure you can quickly come up with a list of key Twitterers and interesting stories to follow. What amazes me is that two teenagers built an app that could significantly contribute to the health and well being of others and they did it while sitting in their dorm rooms at school. No big salaries, no big ideas and no big promises – just a simple app that does one thing and does it well. Sure there is a lot of chaff and you still have to suffer through the bad with the good but just imagine how useful this tool would have been during the China earthquake, Gaza, etc. And, if others are using WordTwit, or similar, to push blog posts to Twitter then we have a powerful tool indeed.
Now, if they would just build in a location identifier that would pull location names and post them, along with the Tweet, on a map so that we could see clusters…
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Hey, thanks for the coverage. We’re constantly striving to add new features including location-based search, replying within the site and making a light-weight version. I hope these new features will help you in the future.
I find http://tweetgrid.com/ to be more useful. Especially when multiple keywords are being used for the same event.
Nirmal-
Thanks for the heads-up! Tweetgrid looks like a very useful tool.
Cheers,
Jon
Interesting!
Totally agree that this is a great tool for humanitarian work! x5315 I encourage you to open source it!
Thanks for the pointers today on this blog, great site I had not seen before.
(via ushahidi.com dev chat)
I have a screenshots the Adobe AIR app Tweetdeck in use as a “crisis dashboard,” as well as a similar one using netvibes. Also here’s one of Tweetgrid as a crisis dashboard, which looks awesome!
Thanks for sharing, Jon. Great to see my alma mater in action.
Thanks for this Jon. I stumbled across your blog while looking around at what different blogs related to humanitarian/development work are doing.
Next week I pick up a role as TEAR Fund’s new Education and Advocacy Manager here in New Zealand. I am specifically interested in looking at how I can use social media tools like Twitter to connect TEAR Fund to its advocates, supporters and partners around the world a whole lot more and increase awareness of the issues TF connects to (
I wasn’t aware of Twitterfall but can see a real strength in it in regards to connecting TEAR Fund to different issues and discussions around the world and in turn connecting others to those.
Thanks for posting this, it could turn out to be a huge help in my new job.
We’ve recently done a huge amount of updates to Twitterfall.com. It may be worth you having another look.
What an amazing application, if rather dazzling. Even as I write, somebody is probably doing exactly what you suggest, developing a cluster applicatio. This if done well would surely be fascinating — even hypmotic — rather like watching fireworks explode all over the world! How I wish I could code at times like this!
Might I suggest that you add a “subscribe to” facility to this comments string? That is unless commenters are already informed by e-mails of replies to their observations. This is a great way of encouraging return visits to your site while enhancing the SEO power of all contributers.
Tony-
Thanks for the feedback. I’ve installed the ‘subscribe to this post’ plug-in so you should now be able to follow comments for all posts.
Cheers,
Jon