There is a set of tools that we generally use to determine how popular something is on the web: Google Trends, Blogpulse Trend Search, Technorati, del.icio.us, various social networking sites, etc.
We can now add another source to that list: Twitter, thanks to a new Twitter mashup called Twittermeter.
]]> Over the past year, Twitter has become the consummate "buzz" platform. It is often the first place people go to talk about news or gossip, to the point where it has at times scooped major news organizations. Unfortunately, Twitter has a poor signal to noise ratio, and it can be rather muddled. So tracking buzz on Twitter has been a rather tall order.Enter Twittermeter. Twittermeter uses the Twitter API to scrape the site's public feed and creates a database of every word sent over Twitter. Though database overages have forced the site to display only results for the past week, they have data since November 6th, 2007 totaling over 14.5 million words from 2.1 million status messages.
Twittermeter creates buzz graphs comparing words. For example, the graph below for the word "earthquake," clearly shows a spike during the UK quake that took place earlier this week.
Twittermeter is another tool we can add to our arsenal when measuring buzz and popularity on the Internet. We'd love to see the service offer a more robust feature set, including the ability to search for phrases, specific a data range, and offer embeddable graphs.
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