Burak Arikan: Twitter Networks / Jeff Clark: TwitArcs

In general, I’m a fan of social software, believing that it has great potential to be useful in the overlapping spheres between the personal and the professional. Nevertheless, I’m somewhat of a late comer to the Twitter revolution. Despite early enthusiasm from smart people like Tom Carden, I initially saw it mostly as a pseudo-chat medium and a potential timewaster. I signed up, then never came back.

However, a recent conversation with Burak Arikan about Twitter and collective thinking made me revisit the Twitter network. And guess what? I like it. Sure, there’s plenty of noise in the Twittersphere. But by wisely choosing whose streams to follow, Twitter becomes much like a collective conversation, providing in-progress snapshots of thoughts and ideas from some people I have come to know and admire.

At its best, Twitter is like a Hive Mind, echoing with ideas and spontaneous viewpoints.
By using a tool like Twhirl or Twitterfox, Twitter becomes an ambient information feed that you can tune in and out of at leisure. Its immediacy means that you’ll never experience the blog reader’s guilt of having 500 unread items in your feed reader. But by following the twitters of interesting people you’ll quickly find links to useful resources and learn about their creative processes.

Twitter tools & visualizations

The following are some recent Twitter-related resources that give an idea of the bigger Twitter picture, including network visualizations and Twitter hacks a little outside the mainstream. Feel free to post comments with links to interesting Twitter tools and hacks.

• Burak Arikan: Growth of a Twitter Graph
• Jeff Clark: TwitArcs / Twitter Spectrum / Twitter StreamGraphs
• explore.twitter.com - Index of Twitter tools, including the Twitter Blocks visualization (created by a Stamen team including the aforementioned Tom Carden)
• Twitterfeed.com - Tool for syndicating a RSS feed as a Twitter stream)
• Twistori - Visualization of twitters relating to emotional states
• Twittervision - Geographical visualization of public twitters

My own Twitter stream can be found at http://twitter.com/mariuswatz/. I try to keep my Twitters somewhat topical, but occasional digressions will occur. After all, that’s the beauty of Twitter.