Reading Tweet Clouds

All sorts of free applications are available for Twitter users. You can get them to organize your messages, track your growth, automatically follow and unfollow, lurk on cursers, or rate tweets on a happiness scale (apparently mine would lead people to believe I’m ‘ridiculously happy’).

Twitter Grader is another one. Just plug in a Twitter account name and it generates a stat page with a grade from one to 100. The grade is a percentile based on various twitstats, ie. number of followers, power of followers, pace of tweeting, etc.

It’s kind of fun and sort of interesting. The more followers you have the higher your percentile will be. And if you post a lot, your grade is likely to rise. That doesn’t mean that you’re posts are interesting, or that your followers are paying attention to anything you’re saying. Only that they haven’t unfollowed you and you keep talking.

For me, the rating aspect of Twitter Grader isn’t so exciting. What I really like about this application is the ‘Tweet Clouds’. From what I can tell, they're a jumble of words from your recent tweets with those you use a lot appearing bigger than the others. With every post they change.

The grade is just a number. The Tweet Clouds are more like poetry. As a tool to get a sense of who's behind the profile picture, I’d choose the clouds over the grades any day. If you saw mine (pictured above) and didn't know I was a cheery tarot reader . . . .

Take a look below to see some other clouds I visited. If you’re on Twitter, check out your own. If you’re not, you still might enjoy looking around. Reading apparently irrational words in a meaningful grouping can be almost as fun as reading pictures on cards.