Jon Samsel

Baa baa TwitterSheep, have you any wool, er, tag clouds?

Ever wonder what your Twitter network of followers would look like as tag cloud? Well now you can transform your Twitter friends into visual cluster tags in a folksonomy, using the free social indexing tool, TwitterSheep.

Twittersheep takes your Twitter username, pulls your follower list, then analyzes each of your follower’s bios to generate a unique tag cloud displaying commonalities. The most common words/interests are displayed in large type.

What’s the value here? Bragging rights, of course! Compare your TwitterSheep flock to those of your friends and colleagues to see who is more of an authority on any given subject. The clouds are also just fun to look at (social eye candy).

But there could be other uses. Imagine if some upstart dating website integrated TwitterSheeps into their user profile database. Members could search according to tag cloud compatibility, or they could hyperlink to people they were interested in dating based on unforseen commonalities.

Twittersheeps could add a feature to their website that automatically generated a new tag cloud on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, then allow users to compile a time-lapse montage of their evolving social history. Of course, Twittersheep could be expanded to other social platforms so that users could generate a broader and more accurate view of their true social sphere. Start with Facesheep, then expand to LinkedSheep and then launch MySpaceSheep. Or just roll them all up into a single unified service and call it SocialSheep.

The possbilities are endless. Perhaps that’s part of reason why so many of us are entranced by everything social media—there are so many exciting possibilities all around us.

Thanks to @runnrgrl via Twitter who turned me on to this handy Twitter tool.

Here is what my flock of 477 Twitter followers @jonsamsel looks like:

This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 4:47 am and is filed under Social Media, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.