Top Twitter Friends visualizes your social network
Top Twitter Friends is a web service that creates a visual map for any Twitter account of the other accounts it is most frequently used to converse with. The site uses the Mailana social network analysis system to analyze Twitter conversations and come up with the data for the visualization.
Marshall Kirkpatrick recently used the Top Twitter Friends web application to generate an analysis of a series of popular twitterers, complete with lists of each Twitterer's most frequently contacted friends, and a screenshot of their visualization. Marshall's perspective is that the openness of this information gives us some pretty intimate insight into the inner circle of influential people in our social networks, and those of notable people.
Not only can you see who people most frequently converse with, but clicking the info link beside a person's account name reveals a tag cloud of the most commonly used words in the conversations between the two Twitter accounts in question, plus an additional link to actually go and read the conversations between them.
I find it strange that while I'm perfectly happy having public conversations with people over Twitter, it makes me feel slightly uncomfortable that those conversations can so easily be searched out and read by anyone that wants to do so. The conversations were public, after all, so it shouldn't feel strange, but somehow it does.
What's your perspective? Does it make you uncomfortable that there are powerful tools for analyzing your social network and the content of your conversations? Let us know in the comments.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
joe said 10:03AM on 3-23-2009
twitter is for people with no friends. if you really cared about someone, you'd talk to them in person.
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