My Twitter Search Tool WhatsTwending is Now Online

One of the primary messages we heard at Chirp was that Twitter is hard to use. For those of us who know and love Twitter, and use it every day, hearing that from Twitter execs came as a bit of a shock. For us, Twitter’s a snap. But our skepticism was quickly replaced by a sense of surprise when @ev, Twitter’s CEO, put up a video of a Stanford grad (yes, that Stanford) trying for five minutes to get Twitter on her phone and failing.

The exact nature of the problem is a different discussion, but the message from Twitter was clear: Using Twitter isn’t idiot-proof yet, and we’re not going to stop trying to make Twitter easier to use until it is idiot-proof.

It was that message from Twitter that motivated me to put one of the Twitter prototypes I’ve been working on online. WhatsTwending is a tool to help people understand the results of Twitter searches at a glance. (Eventually, it will be able to help people understand almost any group of tweets better, but for now it’s confined to searches.) By using statistical methods to compare search results to Twitters “background noise,” WhatsTwending creates a cloud of the most relevant words and phrases from the search and presents it to the user. This is an example cloud from a search for the popular JavaScript library, “jquery”:

As you can see, very relevant terms like “mysql,” “drupal,” and “carousel” jump right out.

If you’re interested in playing with it, WhatsTwending is technically a closed beta… but for my loyal readers, I might just mention that one of the beta accounts has username “sigpwned” and password “roxors” (without the quotes). So, in case that subtle hint wasn’t enough:

A beta account for WhatsTwending you can use has username/password sigpwned/roxors.

If you’re keen to go give a try, head on over and start searching! Be sure to let me know how you like it in the comments.