Week 10, Thing 21 : Microblogging and Mashups

I first visited Twitterholic, which lists the top Twitter users, in order of popularity, calculated according to their number of followers. Twitterholic is truly useful in that it doesn't merely rank an online popularity contest, but also provides information that helps the user figure out whether a given popular person might be truly worth following. That is, it tells how many tweets a user has made. This is useful, because it is hardly worth one's time to follow a person who has two million followers if the person tweeted once or twice and then abandoned the site. Twitterholic also lists the number of users each top Twitterer follows. Some follow only a very small number, while some follow back each of the million people who follow them. I'm not favorably disposed towards celebrities who follow back hundreds of thousands of followers, since they can't possibly read that many people, and the only reason to follow back everyone, if one has thousands of followers, is a lame and transparent attempt at marketing. But, a celebrity with a million followers and a couple hundred of follow-backs, on the other hand, is often a person who has an interest in using Twitter to have actual conversations. I've seen some famous musicians and actors on Twitter have actual discussions with their "followers" on Twitter, and it can be an enlightening (or, sometimes, dismaying) glimpse of people one will probably never meet face to face.

Back to the statistics revealed by Twitterholic, it's an interesting measure of the rising popularity of Twitter itself that just a few months ago, Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kushner were having a friendly competition to see which one of them would be the first to get a million followers, while right now there are 118 Twitter users with over a million followers.

After spending some time at Twitterholic, I went to The Twitter Fan Wiki and clicked on a number of the links. Some were no longer working, and some seemed to be little more than keyword search engines (not very useful, given that Twitter has its own keyword search function.) Here briefly are links to the mashups I liked from that list (although there may also be some good ones I haven't listed, since I didn't check every single link):

Geochirp : "allows you to find real time Tweeples within 1 to 50 miles of any location in the world. You can search for specific phrases & see who is tweeting about these keywords, within any neighborhood of interest to you. Also has a language translation tool to convert foreign tweets to the language you understand. (quote from the Twitter Fan Wiki.)" Does just that! Instantly took me to my current location, and showed me tweets from nearby people. It instantly demonstrated accuracy by showing a tweet that referred to someone who I know to be nearby.

Track This Now for Twitter : Enter a search term, see markers on a map of the world, showing the countries where the word is most used on Twitter. Click on a marker to see tweets from a county, using the term entered. Very interesting. I input the politically-loaded term "socialized medicine" (a term which American conservatives use to disparage plans that would extend medical insurance to those suffering under our current, supposedly "free market" system.) As expected, the United States appears to be the top country in the use of this term in Tweets. Other countries with many tweets employing the term more often use it ironically, disparaging conservatives' attempts to portray progressive policies as "socialist."

Favrd : shows popular tweets, as calculated by number of users who "favorite" each tweet.

Food From Twitter : Food-related tweets with food pictures, via Twitter's photo ap, yfrog. You can select breakfast, lunch, or dinner photos to view.