With such a crowded market, it is time to get showcase a few a week
There is so much happening in the social networking sphere that I’m going to start a series of notes on the topic. Each note will briefly cover two or three topics and for this, the first one, I have three Twitter related items for you.
First up is Trendsmap published by Stateless Systems, a very interesting near real-time visualization of tweets that have been geolocated. This service is an experiment in contexturalizing Twitter activity. They use Google’s geoip service and the location data that many users provide in their account details to geolocate but tweets appear to clump around the major ISP’s points of presence.
Of course what Trendsmap is doing is displaying a relatively small sampling of Twitter activity (it’s estimated that Twitter users are currently generating 300 to 600 tweets per second) but their samples are enough for them to be able to identify trending topics (shown at the bottom of the display). Click on a topic and you can drill down to see what’s currently being tweeted and the number of related tweets plotted over the last week.
Most of the Trendsmap analyses are qualitative so they are mainly useful as indicators of trends rather than something you can derive statistics from. There’s also no API, which is a pity as the data sets Trendsmap generates look like they could be really valuable in mashups.
My second item is related to Twitter trending: The impact of Twitter on brands.
Jim Jansen, associate professor of information science and technology in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) at Penn State, doctoral student Mimi Zhang, undergraduate student Kate Sobel and Twitter chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury sliced and diced half a million tweets to try to find out why brands were mentioned.
They found that “20 percent of the tweets contained product information in the form of asking and providing, thus giving companies a ‘rich source’ of information concerning issues and questions that customers have regarding their products.” In other words, given the size of the Twitter population (23 million unique visits in September this year), branding on Twitter really matters.
My final item is related to the list one: TweetedBrands, is a simple service that tracks the use of brand names on Twitter. It provides a list of brands ranked according to the frequency with which they appear in tweets over the day. As it stands and despite the frequencies being shown TweetedBrands is also more qualitative then quantitative (and again, no API … come on people!). Even so, if you’re a major brand manager this service is worth keeping on your radar.
