The more I use Twitter as a microblogging tool, the more I want features that I've come to take for granted in the blogging realm. One of those is tag clouds. TweetClouds to the rescue.
If you use Twitter as a microblogging platform rather than a shared virtual space among close friends, you might want your own tweet cloud.
Just go over to tweetclouds.com and enter your twitter account name and press go. As you can see above, it took 111 seconds to calculate my cloud. That's how long it took with 150 tweets to process. Tweetclouds have taken off in the Twittersphere this week so going is a little slow if you have a lot of tweets. But, how cool?
After it is done, you see your tweetcloud and get your own page and URL. Here's the tokerud cloud URL.
The next step from my point of view is to have links in each of those cloud words so I/you can click on a word and see the tweets. I'm thinking everyone on Twitter needs a dynamic cloud that is connected to search.
Don't get me wrong, Twitter is above all fun. But, part of using Twitter as an information aggregation tool is building a good list of people to follow.
I am following about 100 people right now. I spend a bit of time each day browsing for new people to follow. These tweet clouds would be a boon to this endeavor.
If every tweeter had his or her own searchable cloud, I could tweetscan for people based on my interests and some resourceful twitter developer could match my cloud to other tweeters' clouds and give me friend recommendations. Wouldn't that be fun?