Twist - See trends on twitter

by dbasch — 3 Comments »

We just released a fun tool called Twist. If you are familiar with Google Trends, it should be obvious what it does. It allows you to track trends on Twitter over the past week, with a granularity of a couple of hours. While testing the tool we saw spikes in the charts whenever an interesting story broke (especially about technology or celebrities). We discovered trends such as the fact that people who Twitter tend to have lunch rather than breakfast on weekdays, but both are mentioned equally on weekends:

http://twist.flaptor.com/freq?gram=lunch,%20breakfast

This tool is coupled with our Twitter search engine, so you can see what people are saying about the concepts shown in the charts. We really like Twitter and we are excited about this project, so stay tuned for more improvements.

By the way, both applications run on Amazon EC2.

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  1. This is really fun AND it would be super if you could eliminate the comma for the permalink, cuz it won’t tweet correctly.

    I shrunk this one myself, and eliminated the space after the comma
    http://twitter.com/funDivaChristy/statuses/794577055

    These I just c&p’d and even without the space, the comma broke the URL
    http://twitter.com/funDivaChristy/statuses/794575405

    But still a really fun idea, reminds me of googlefight

    :) @funDivaChristy

  2. Are you going to release an API?

  3. This is great! Could you please post more details on how you built the index? Thanks in advance!

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