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.
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
