On the pulse

It’s fascinating how new layers of Twitter as a platform for our thoughts keep emerging.

I saw Twitter-maker Ev Williams say today that he loves Twistori, which was inspired by friend Jonathan Harris’ WeFeelFine. It simply pulls out the tweets that have the words love, hate, think, believe, feel, and wish in them. It’s oddly compelling.

I’ve also seen work by the BBC and Reuters, among others, in trying to extract news from Twitter (and other us-created media) by looking for the hot words of news (explosion, evacuate…). This becomes a sort of canary in the news mine. People are writing about their lives and when news happens to or around them, they’ll surely tell their friends about it and now that is aggregated and searchable.

Next I expect someone to come up with a national mood index based on our tweets. Today, we’re feeling self-conscious.