Now This Looks Interesting

If you are a bit of a trend seeker like myself (that is not trend setter, I am as fashionable as a red setter) you will be interested in ferreting out information about what people are thinking, doing and saying. This would explain my infatuation with FriendFeed and today my love-at-first-sight meeting with Twitscoop.

This thing is awesome (and is probably not unique) as it shows you in cloud form what words are “big” right now in the Twitterverse. I happened to take a screen shot earlier today after the announcement of Yves Saint Laurent’s death. Can you see how the news was suddenly a HUGE topic on twitter.

You can see that everything else being spoken about is dwarfed by this discussion. Hover your mouse over the words and the last 5 or so Twitters on the subject are displayed. Click on the word and they are all displayed in chronological order.

I was a little late catching the Thirty Day Challenge broadcast hype screenshot, being about an hour into the broadcast I missed the lead up, but this gives some idea.

Ok that is pretty cool but what else can it do? A couple of things that I can see that are useful…

You can save specific clouds, which I am guessing might be a vanity thing, but would be great for when you see something interesting but don’t have time to investigate.

You can search for terms and look at the trend over 1-6 hours – 3 days. I can see using this for launches as a hype meter, research into how trends pass through twitter, and monitor how the rise and fall.

Here again is “Yves Saint Laurent” search term over today

And then there is the search term search which I love in web page format. For niche research it is a beauty! Killer use – type in “question” and see people asking all sorts of things. ” I have a question blah blah blah” “Can someone answer my question”. The view is over a three day period maximum, but still that is fertile ground to dig into for ideas. For those people in the Thirty Day Challenge this could be a pretty handy tool to use

I was able to tell Jason Moffatt that only two people had mentioned Goji Juice (his pet thing) over the last few days. Only two in how many people?

Oh and what is that to the left of the cloud? Why it is the recent bigger hitters in Twitter about every two hours. Now if that doesn’t give you ideas I don’t know what will!