Word cloud of my 42,051 tweets to-date
Twitter announced last December that they were going to make it possible for any Twitter user to download a full archive of all their tweets.
Since then I have been occasionally checking my Settings in Twitter to see if the Your Twitter archive option had yet appeared, and today it did. Wohoo! The option when clicked, creates your archive, and then emails you a link to download it in zipped form.
I downloaded the archive and was delighted to find all my Tweets there (right back to my less than profound first Tweet!). *cringe*
Even more useful is that the archive is searchable and it contains links to the original tweets on Twitter.
I mentioned this on Facebook where Darren Barefoot spotted it and commented that he’d created a word cloud from his archive. Nice idea I thought.
He wrote a blog post on how to do this which boils down to:
- Concatenate the csv files in the data->csv folder into a single file (you can do this on a Mac by issuing “
cat *.csv > outputfile” in Terminal) - Sort and delete the surplus headings from your concatenated file and
- Copy the text of your tweets into the Create field in Wordle*
I was interested to see in the word cloud which emerged just how much I use the old style RT.
Other nice take-aways for me from this are that my Twitter stream seems to use mostly positive words (Thanks, good and great are some of the most used words in my stream), and that I seem to talk to @dahowlett, and @monkchips most of all (and for some reason I seem to talk to myself (@tomraftery) a lot too – first sign of madness?
Ok, now I have my archive down, I may need to do some more slicing and dicing on the Tweets – anyone have any suggestions for interesting things to look for?
Also, I need to check if the archive download link which Twitter emailed me is a perpetually updating archive, or if it was a point in time link. Hopefully the former.
*You will need to have Java turned on for this to work
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