A New Twitter Research Tool Offers Insights In What People Are Twittering About

Buy an ad on DigitalJournal.com

If you've never heard of Twitter and are in constant contact with people, you should check it out. Twitter is a kind of microblogging tool that allows you to stay in contact with your friends by typing 140 character lines on a website, answering the question 'what are you doing?'

Millions of people all around the world are Twittering and you can imagine that this 'global conversation' is offering all kinds of new material for data mining/marketing experts as well as journalists.

Twittermeter is the latest of a series of tools that has been released, aimed at bringing order in this chaotic, relentless stream of messages. Twittermeter's inventor, Greg Lavallee, designed the tool to track what people are Twittering about in a graphical, subject plotted timeline. Just like on Google Trends, you input one or two search terms and you’ll see a graph of just how often the term was used in a predetermined time frame.

The Twitter journalistic community needs a tool like this more than anything else. A journalist is able to track a particular topic’s popularity in a way similar to Google Trends. Ideally, Twittermeter would also provide a real time option, but it’s something to wait out for yet. The tool helps people make informed decisions on what was topical. Should the tool go real time, you’d have an incredibly accurate insight into whether what you’re reporting on is hot or not.

Lavallee says he’s collaborating with Terraminds, a Twitter search engine to create a similar tracking tool for searches and that is promising. Twittermeter currently provides details for a week’s time frame and Lavallee is going to add more features to it.

disclosure: Angelique van Engelen is a freelance writer for reporTwitters, a blog about journalism and Twitter.