Remember those old Venn Diagrams from high school or junior high? Jeff Clark of Neoformix continues to roll out interesting tools to graphically display information we are brushing up against every day online. One of his latest creations is a fun tool called "Twitter Venn", which mines Twitter for tweets with keywords you select, shows the frequency at which they are mentioned, compares that to other words you are searching, shows overlap, and other related words. The result is a fun tool that gives insight into how frequently words are paired or otherwise combined.
For example, if you were to poll the terms "fantasy", "football", and "college", you would see there is a lot of discussion around "fantasy football" and "college football", but unfortunately, not too much discussion of a "college fantasy", and even fewer about "fantasy college football".
In fact, the terms "fantasy" + "college" + "football" are combined in a tweet just under once a day, contrasted with more than 300 tweets a day for "college" + "football" and 36 tweets a day for both "fantasy" and "football", a number I'd have guessed ran higher.
You can combine simple word pairs, like "chocolate" and "bacon" and find while both words are popular on Twitter, the combination of "chocolate" + "bacon" is much less frequently tweeted. While chocolate musters more than 1,100 tweets a day, combining it with bacon drops down to just over 30.
Twitter Venn lets you click on any segment of the resulting diagram to show other words that are in the tweets that generated the positive results. Clicking on "bacon" + "chocolate" for example shows that the words "cookies", "eggs", "food" and more show up. You can even see the individual tweets that were discovered.
Twitter Venn graphically shows what simple queries to Twitter Search would be unable to find. How much more frequently is iPhone tweeted than Apple? Almost 4 times to 1. And the combination of "Apple" + "iPhone" exceeds "Apple" + "iTunes" by a 7 to 1 margin.
Neoformix even rolled out an update before the New Year that let you search for terms that contained the same keyword, so if you wanted to search for Obama and both "lower taxes" and "raise taxes", you could do it.
Click this URL to see: http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitterVenn/view.php?q=Obama,raise+taxes,lower+taxes
I previously highlighed Neoformix back in June as a blog to watch. Luckily, I've kept Neoformix in my RSS reader because the site continues to introduce some very interesting tools. If you don't mind taking a few seconds for your browser to poll Twitter and find your results, you'll like Twitter Venn.