What do the people who you follow on Twitter say about you? I was curious about whether we can infer anything about a person based on their Twitter friends’ interests. To test this out, I wrote Twitter Interest Cloud, which:
- Takes all your Twitter friends (who you follow)
- Looks up the URLs in their profile on delicious, and gets the tags
- Generates a tag cloud of those tags
Mostly just a fun experiment, and works much better if you follow semi-famous people whose pages have been tagged on Delicious. It does do a decent job of capturing interests though; here’s the cloud for Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey (@jack):
If you want to check it out, here’s the source (Python). Shoot me an email (mkrieger [at] hci.stanford.edu) if you’d like me to generate a cloud for you.
If you make any improvements, please let me know! Thanks to Brynn Evans for getting me to brush it up and blog about it.
