Is it doing any good? Do our efforts, symbolic or concrete, have any impact? We don't really know. Critics will point out that, for the most part, people are jumping on a bandwagon. Very few of us have any real grasp of Iran's political or social complexities; we have no idea who the leading opposition candidate is or what kind of record he has (and most of us would recoil if we found out). All true.

What we do have, though, is a shared belief in human dignity, and a shared recognition that this is a chance for that cause to take a big step forward. Green avatars are, in a sense, a way of signaling as much to each other: "Yeah, I care about this, too." Perhaps we do this to show solidarity as much with each other as with the people of Iran.

More Noise to Signal.

Three Keywords - Three Languages

In its current state, Monitter is restricted to always displaying three keyword searches in three separate columns. Once you change the keywords, Monitter will display the last tweet with those keywords in it and then constantly update the search. In our tests, it never took more than 30 seconds before Monitter picked up on a new tweet.

One of the really cool features of Monitter is that you can filer tweets by language. Right now, those languages are English, Spanish, and German. Overall, those filters seemed to work very well. This does, however, also mean that you won't see tweet in other languages, which is a bit of a limitation, but will probably only bother very few users.

As the folks over at Web Worker Daily point out, Monitter also works great in a site specific browser like Fluid on the Mac or Bubbles on the PC.

Widget

The Monitter team has also built an embeddable widget so that you can display these searches on your own site. Because of how wide the widget has to be, though, this approach might not be really useful for a lot of people.

Competition

There are, of course, various Twitter search engines available already. Summize, which was bought by Twitter and is now the standard Twitter search engine, is great way to search for specific keywords and allows you to reply to tweets right from the application. Twitscoop, which we reviewed about a month ago, is also a very capable Twitter search engine and features a very cool, constantly updating tag cloud.

Verdict

In terms of its features, one nice addition to Monitter would be the ability to reply to tweets right out of the application. Even more interesting would be the ability to send tweets right out of the app, which would, of course, make it even more of a TweetDeck for the browser (an inspiration that, by the way, the developer fully acknowledges). Also, it would be nice if you could turn off the language filtering.

Overall, though, Monitter is a cool and well designed way to monitor certain keywords on Twitter. It is not so much useful as a search engine, as it only displays the last tweet that matches your keywords. Its power is in constantly updating these search results, and while its competitors can do this as well, Monitter's ability to track more than one search is often very useful. If you already use TweetDeck, this application might not be too useful for you. However, if you are using Twhirl or any other Twitter client, then you could do a lot worse than giving Monitter a try.

The idea of using a tag cloud to track memes on Twitter is obviously not new, but having the tag cloud update dynamically makes for a whole new experience. While testing Twitscoop this morning, for example, the news about Carl Icahn's newest letter to Yahoo's shareholders was breaking on Twitter and made it onto Twitscoop's tag cloud within less than a minute.

Sometimes, the items on the tag cloud seem to appear more because of serendipity than because they are real memes. If five people write the 'dumb' or 'w00t' within 10 minutes of each other, for example, it will show up in the cloud, even though the tweets are not related at all.

If a tag cloud seems especially noteworthy, you can easily send a tweet with a permalink to the cloud. While this might only be useful in a very limited number of occasions, it is a nice feature to have nevertheless.

As of now, Twitscoop does not feature an API, nor does it have a widget for its live tag cloud that you could put on your blog or your desktop.

Search

Twitscoop is also a very capable Twitter search engine. While it is pretty basic, in that it doesn't feature live updates like Summize, or organize conversations like Quotably, it does show a nice graph of how often a search term has been used on Twitter in the last 6 to 72 hours (see screenshot). Just like on Summize, you can reply to a tweet from the search page and there is a link to the original tweet as well.

Twitscoop picks up new tweets very fast - most appear in under one minute.

Verdict

The ideal Twitter search engine would combine the live updates and API from Summize, the live tag cloud from Twitscoop, and the conversation tracking from Quotably. As of now, we still have to wait for this, but Twitscoop's live updates are definitely worth taking a closer look at and its search engine is a good alternative to Summize.

TweetDeck is an AIR based application that was first discovered by Louis Gray. The major difference between TweetDeck and other Twitter clients like Twhirl, Snitter, Twitteriffic, and AlertThingy, is that it displays more than one column of information at a time. In TweetDeck, you can define columns for your replies, numerous searches in Summize, as well as groups. You can define up to 10 different columns.

The developers seem keenly aware of Twitter's problems and provide you with a status message at the bottom right of the client. We have seen it alternate between "Pretty much okay" and "Rate limit exceeded'" today. There is also an indication for when the last tweets were received in the bottom left corner of the application.

Columns

The column display can be rearranged according to taste - only the "All Tweets" column is fixed on the left side. Having all these columns open at the same time obviously means that TweetDeck occupies a lot more screen estate than other Twitter clients - however, the amount of information displayed is far greater as well. For some, this is a trade-off worth making, while it might be a deal-breaker for others.

Groups

The groups function is very useful, especially for people who follow a lot of people, but still want to be able to quickly see what their closest friends (or competitors) are saying. Usually, these messages are easily drowned out in the mass of tweets that come in at any given time.

Once a group is created, you can make changes to it by clicking on its name.

Right now, when you create a group, TweetDeck doesn't display a list of all your friends right away. As TweetDeck becomes aware of more of your friends over time, this problem disappears as TweetDeck's internal database picks up on your friends, but this might be quite confusing and frustrating for first time users.

Preferences

One area where TweetDeck could use some more work is in its preferences - right now, there pretty much are none. You can't change the speed by which it checks for new tweets, there are no themes to chose from (why, by the way, do all AIR apps have to be so dark?), and there is no way to change the size of the fonts.

Verdict

TweetDeck is probably not for everyone, but especially with Twitter's track function still being offline for now, the ability to have a persistent Summize search right in the client is a great feature just by itself. Once the group function works a little bit better, I would venture to guess that a lot more people will start using it. But even in its current state, it is definitely worth a closer look.

Most strikingly, we found that a whopping 5% of all Twitter (in terms of tweets) is powered by the top 100 active accounts. Those 100 users post updates 200-3000 times a day, which might even impress uber-Twitter users like Robert Scoble or Jason Calacanis.

What we saw was that the top Twitter users are not always people, but rather, they're sources using Twitter as a feed publishing platform. For example, the most active user we saw was an account called "lejddfr," which does "push journalism" (sending out frequent links to new stories) for French news service Le Journal du Dimanche. lejddfr has just 315 followers, is following no one, and has made over 101,000 tweets. Another example we saw is "GSSP," which tweets links to stories on the news web site NewzOf.com. Our favorite high volume Twitter user, though is "chandraxray," a space station that tweets its location up to 350 times per day.

To get a feel for the distribution of tweeting activity across the Twitter universe, we sorted users by the number of tweets per day and graphed that vs. the total traffic. 66% of the users only tweet once per day.

But that still doesn't answer the question of what people are talking about. So we started analyzing tweets and came up with a list of the top five words people send. Apparently, the first thing anyone sends out on Twitter is a "test" message.

1. test
2. lol
3. working
4. :)
5. sleeping

Unfortunately, while we can guess from that list that Twitter users tend to be sleepy workaholics who are generally happy, we still can't tell much about what they're really talking about on the service. So we next applied some fancy topic extraction and started calculating trends over our week's worth of data.

What we found is that there are three main types of conversations going on. First, there are status updates of every day occurrences such as, "getting coffee," "check out this post on X," "going to sleep," or other mundane life things. Second, there are short term memes where many people talk about some event before, during, or after it. These conversations are usually short lived -- ranging from a few minutes to a few hours. For example a TV show like "Lost" will have some buzz, before, during, and for a short time after the show airs, but will drop out of the stream very quickly. We saw that happen with "LSD" when the drug's creator Albert Hoffman died last week. The final type of discussion we see on Twitter, are long term memes. These are topics of interest that people talk about for days, weeks, or even months. Politics or new video games are great examples of these longer term discussions happening on the platform.

Below we selected a subset of the automatic trends found for the week to illustrate this phenomenon. Each column from left to right shows the days of the week. Topics on the top of each stack represent shorter lived memes, while topics lower on the chart represent items of longer term interest.

You can click on the links below to explore the memes on those days:

Sunday, April 27: Obama, GTA IV, Mario Kart Wii, Coachella, Facebook, NFL, BBQ, Ubuntu, Spurs
Monday, April 28: Obama, GTA IV, Mario Kart Wii, Coachella, Rev Wright, iMacs, Facebook, Social Brew
Tuesday, April 29: Obama, GTA IV, Iron Man, Rev Wright, Ben Jerry, Celtics, Lakers, Deal or No Deal
Wednesday, April 30: Obama, GTA IV, Iron Man, American Idol, LSD, iGoogle, Violet Hill, Neil Diamond, Spurs
Thursday, May 1: Obama, GTA IV, Iron Man, RSS Awareness Day, Diggnation, Baskin Robbins
Friday, May 2: Obama, GTA IV, Iron Man, DC Madam, Hawks, BSG, Lost
Saturday, May 3: Obama, GTA IV, Iron Man, Kentucky Derby, Free Comic Book Day, Maker Faire, YouTube, Boris

Conclusion

While technology, politics, and geekery (sci-fi movies and video games) tend to dominate the long term memes, people are discussing all sorts of things on Twitter -- from sports to pop culture to cooking. Could that indicate that the site it starting to have some mainstream appeal? Or maybe just that even us tech geeks occasionally find time to talk about things other than technology? Either way, the way memes flow on Twitter is an interesting topic and one that we had fun looking at.

Special thanks to Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, co-founder of Summize, a conversational search engine. Dr. Chowdhury did all of the data mining and analysis for the this post, as well collaborated on the text and created the charts.