Twitterfall – an essential tool for aid workers and humanitarian bloggers

by Jon Thompson on January 25, 2009

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:

TwitterfallAnd here is what I came up with:

TwitterfallWhile 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…

{ 7 trackbacks }

Links:10th February « BBC World Service Trust blog
February 11, 2009 at 2:12 am
Twitterfall - a perfect Twitter interface for journalists? | Online Journalism Blog
February 24, 2009 at 2:05 pm
Twitterfall is A New Twitter Tool for Journalists | Tweet Eden
March 2, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Heads up on a new Twitter tool « The Coalitionist
April 24, 2009 at 7:29 am
Twitterfall Launches Twitter Reply Search Engine - Cash-Bandit.com
August 26, 2009 at 12:03 am
Twitterfall Launches Twitter Reply Search Engine | Guilda Blog
August 27, 2009 at 2:11 am
Glenn Beck Info | BLB
September 20, 2010 at 3:56 pm

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