On this day, two years ago, I generatedthis chart using tweetVolume. It shows how frequently each of these words occurs in Twitter conversations:
Here’s what that same chart looks like today:
It’s somewhat biased by the current NHL playoffs, but it’s interesting to see how the term ‘php’ still dwarfs the other terms. Not particularly scientific, but does it indicate that Twitter’s audience still skews geeky? Or maybe it just shows that the Twitter power users are a nerdy bunch?
Regular readers know that I love nifty information visualizations, particularly when they’re about, well, me. So, I was pleased to discover LastGraph. It grabs your public Last.fm music-listening data and renders it in a number of interesting ways. The most interesting is a big-ass timeline poster of the music you’ve listened to.
I think I was a fairly early adopter of Last.fm (or, actually, its predecessor, AudioScrobbler), so I had 144 weeks of listening data to work with (hmm…I can’t figure out how to make this embedded object shorter–I adjusted all of the ‘height’ values I could find, to no avail):
Back in March, inspired by Tara Hunt, I wrote a post which, in part, imagined what Shakespeare’s Twitter account might look like. I thought it was marginally funny, but there was a germ of an idea there. I got to wondering…
What would God’s Twitter account look like?
I got to chatting with my friend Heather about the idea, and we started working on TwitterAllMighty.com. We’d skin a Drupal site so that it looked like a Twitter page, write a few funny tweets from famous people, and invite site visitors to submit their own.
Why is my first instinct to satirize new tech trends? More on this later, maybe.
We registered the URL and got to work, but we rapidly got really busy, sick, busy some more, moved to Malta, and so forth. The idea died on the vine.
Here’s what it might have looked like (click for larger version):
I have a fair number of random ideas like this. Some get started, a few get completed and the rest just float around in the ether. I was thinking about why I finish the projects I do, and came up with this graph (click for larger version):
Yes, my busyness and laziness have something to do with my success rate, but I think it’s mostly driven by the quality of the idea. If I think an idea is great–like GetaFirstLife.com–and friends respond really positively to me when I pitch it, then I’ve got a lot of inertia to get it done.
On the other hand, if I’m not overly excited by the idea, and it only gets a lukewarm reception from colleagues, then I’m far less motivated to get it done. That’s pretty much what happened with TwitterAllMighty.com (it’s about half done). It was a marginal idea, so I didn’t cross the threshold of completion. That said, I obviously think it’s good enough to share the skeleton of the idea with you kind folks.
