Use Case for List Mining on Twitter

Let’s say that you think it would be interesting to follow the health reform discussion via Twitter going on in the House, the Senate, and with other decision makers on Capitol Hill. The first thing that I would do, if I were you, would be to create a list of the aforementioned legislators, like this one I called Politicos.

Now you’re all set, right? Wrong. How much utility are you really going to get out of monitoring this list? Not much, unless you’re constantly looking at it… And who can do that?

If I am creating lists around topics of interest, I want an easy way to filter through the noise. In the case above, I only care about what these people have to say about a specific topic… yet they could be talking about myriad topics throughout the day. If I manually follow the list I created I would have to have that channel on around the clock and be paying attention to catch the tweets I care about.

Imagine if there was a tool that would allow you to import the lists that you created, the lists that you follow, and the lists that follow you, so that you could immediately identify what’s hot and who’s tweeting the most in them at that time. Keep imagining and also imagine if you could do this today for free, because I’m here to tell you that you can…

List Mining

For those of you following the myTPSreport saga at home, love you ma, I’m really excited to announce some killer functionality to myTPSreport.com. When you oAuth in to myTPSreport, you now have the ability to analyze the conversations going on in the lists that you care about. Extra Bonus: You can also double click pretty much anywhere on the page to filter your search down to details you care about.

For example, you can find trending topics within your list below the map display and click on any of them to filter your results. Let’s say we want to see what people from my Politicos list are saying when they use the word “Obama” in their tweets. After clicking on “Obama” in the graph, the screen refreshes to display information about all the tweets containing that word. Now we can see that 15 of 200 tweets contain “Obama” in them and 11 of 87 users have tweeted about “Obama.” We can also see who they are and exactly what they tweeted when they used the word Obama in their tweets. Plus we can retweet or reply directly to any of those tweets, just like we always could…

Don’t forget that you’re not limited to only filtering on trending topics, either. You can also double click on any word in the tweet stream and use it as a filter for your display results. This could come in handy if you see a word in the tweet stream that isn’t trending but looks interesting nonetheless.

What Do You Think?

I’m pretty ate up about the data around being social online and I’m always looking to talk with other people who are into it too. Feel free to praise or flame myTPSreport in the comments below so that we can talk about where tools like this can go in the future.