Twitter List Profile Clouds

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Sun, 08 Nov 2009

Twitter recently introduced the Twitter List feature which lets people define sets of user accounts that are related in some manner. The lists are given a name and can be followed by other people who are interested in seeing all the tweets from the accounts in the list. Popular twitter users such as Robert Scoble appear on thousands of lists - 3963 for Robert at this time. My twitter Id JeffClark, appears on a more modest 40 lists for comparison.

The act of assigning someone to a list is a type of tagging operation and the name of the list gives a clue regarding how that person is regarded by others. I've used the new Twitter List API to get the names of all the lists that Scoble currently appears on. Some simple counting (using code of course) gives us a table showing the most common names for lists that he appears on. The first few entries are:

  • tech: 567
  • social-media: 127
  • technology: 116
  • socialmedia: 87
  • bloggers: 51
  • geeks: 43

I have used these names and frequency counts to generate a Shaped Word Cloud that illustrates the various list names that list creators associate with Scoble.

Here is another Twitter List Profile Cloud below - this one is for Guy Kawasaki. It has many similarities to the one for Scoble but there some names much more prominent for Guy: marketing, business, and entrepeneurs for example.

And here is a third. Can you guess who it's for?

The icons used for the word clouds are from here: man ,woman .

 


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