A sure sign that Twitter is regaining good health: the third-party applications are returning. TweetScan, for example, sent me my first email summary of a few tracked words in almost a month. And we are still getting new ones. Welcome, TwitScoop.
Twitscoop: A real-time aggregator of tweet content
Twitter just announced improvements in performance, sparking rumors of an impending return to normal API limits of 70 requests per hour per account. While IM integration and the very useful Twitter tracking have not yet been restored, this is happy buzz that makes new application releases even more exciting.
Twitscoop uses an automated algorithm to generate an aggregate picture of the latest chatter in the Twitter channel. It scans hundreds of tweets every minute to extract keywords being used more than normal. This is turned into a tag cloud and a phrase list to give viewers an idea of what people are talking about. Where TweetScan has been most useful to batch and archive specific keywords, Twitscoop is the most advanced tool for understanding what is happening in the moment.
There has been a lot of positive press about the value Twitter offers in reporting news (or rumors) quickly. The short message length and many ways to interact with the service help make microblogging a first option for quick commentary. Given the rapid spread of information in networks, it doesn’t take long for key hubs to find and transmit such late-breaking messages to the masses. What that dispersion of information does not do, however, is aggregate several such topics into one view. Twitscoop does.
Twitscoop does some other interesting things, too. The tool allows you to search for conversations by username, something for which I haven’t found much use yet. Twitscoop does have a Twitter account, naturally, and seems to be sending out interesting phrases as they become hot topics. One of the better features is a mouse-over action with the phrase lists that reveals some examples of specific tweets and a chart showing instances of the topic in the last 24 hours.
Also cool: you can open the web page and let the tag cloud update on its own. Like Twittervision and other visualizations of the public timeline, this allows you to “watch” the Twitter channel. Unlike a Google map with locations of specific tweets, however, Twitscoop focuses on the aggregated message and the collective wisdom of all members using the service. You can capture specific moments and tweet them from the web site.
TweetScan—which isn’t a direct competitor, but simply in a similar area of development—does have a second-generation API, a more and more common thing for third-party applications to provide. I don’t see one yet on Twitscoop, but there is a mountain of interesting visualizations to be mined once it opens the data flow a bit.
BTW, I first learned about this service on Twine, another very interesting information community I need to blog about in the near future. (If you want invites, I’ve got plenty.)