Twistori, according to the site, is the "first step in an ongoing social experiment." The brainchild of Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs, Twistori pulls tweets from Twitter (via Summize) containing specific keywords: i love, i hate, i think, i believe, i feel, and i wish. In then publishes the tweets it finds anonymously in a non-stop, auto-updating river of news. The result is a continuous stream of feelings from the Twitter community.
It's not clear from the site what the second step in the experiment is, but Hoy and Fuchs say that the project was inspired by We Feel Fine, which aggregates feelings from a large number of blogs and social sites. We Feel Fine created a number of explorable data visualizations based on the feelings it gathered, and used it to draw some interesting broad conclusions.
That could certainly be a next step for Twistori, which right now presents a stream of consciousness view of the Twitter emotional landscape. Because the project comes from Hoy and Fuchs, it draws heavily on Prototype and is stunningly designed.
Be cautioned: watching the feelings of anonymous Twitter users scroll by can be strangely addictive.
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Twistori: A Twitter Zeitgeist Social Experiment.
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Oh yeah, that is hypnotic, you could watch that all day, my boss will love this...so will the rest of the office. LOL!
Posted by: Dan | April 29, 2008 11:01 AM"Hypnotic" indeed...
There's just something about reading the "wish" feed... I don't know if I should be sad or happy, but I'm sure that if they added a piano-only dramatic soundtrack to that feed, people would cry and laugh at the pace of tweets coming in...
Cute... ^^,
Posted by: Levi Figueira | April 29, 2008 3:33 PMOk, now back to real life/work! :p
i normally bash most startups into pieces... you should see me in the meetings, i make developers and dreamers cry but i gotta say i like this thing... not as a business, it won't make money but the entertainment factor, it's cool.
Posted by: Bam Azizi | April 29, 2008 4:40 PMi have just started getting in to twitter. thanks for the info on the new application
Posted by: cohnsey | April 29, 2008 7:23 PMHi! Amy from Twistori here. Thanks for the article, we're really tickled!
The next step is secret, but it's not unclear to us. All will reveal itself in due time ;) I really hope that people will enjoy it as much as step 1.
I especially wanted to say to Bam Azizi: not everything has to be about money, does it? Twistori has nothing to do with money for us, at all, ever.
Cheers - and keep your eyes peeled (you can follow the app updates at @twistori on twitter.)
Posted by: Amy | April 30, 2008 5:57 AMAlong similar lines, check out our app, Twist. It allows you to follow trends on Twitter in a way similar to Google Trends.
See the trend for Twistori, it had a peak of mentions this past Tuesday. You can also see what people are saying about it.
Posted by: diego | May 2, 2008 1:25 PMA beautiful project . . . Mesmerizing and with such a visceral impact.
Posted by: thombrown3 | May 14, 2008 12:45 PM