i've built a simple visualisation of twitter trends which i'm calling twends. like everything else in life, it's in permanent beta.

twitter's trend api can be used to find out what the popular keywords, hashtags or phrases were on a particular day or during a particular week back until 19 November 2008. i've used the option to get the trending terms for a particular day, which provides an almost hour by hour breakdown. i say almost because sometimes there's no data for some hours and sometimes it's not quite on the hour. but it's great data and the output is really only an approximation.

so about that output. it's shaped like a 24 hour analogue clock. so going clockwise around one rotation moves from 00:00 to 23:59 on that day. i've taken the most popular trending terms, ordered them by how long during the day they were trending and filled in a segment of the circle for each part. so the terms that trend all day get a full circle, but something that trends for an hour only gets a slice one 24th of a circle positioned appropriately. the radius of the segment is proportional to the time spent trending so the topics that trended for longer are larger. the colors associate the trend term on the right to the drawn segment on the left and also make it a little colorful because too much grey makes jack a dull boy.

you can click on the trend text on the right to see filter the visual to only that trend and use the 'reset view' link to show them all again. the » link takes you to the actual trending tweets for that day and that term. i'm using the 'since' and 'until' twitter search parameters for that and unfortunately there seems to be a paging limit on results which means older dates don't work. i might have to think of something else.

good data visualisation is a balance between aesthetic beauty and information communication. twends hasn't hit that sweet spot but i've got other ideas i'll be exploring. this was a real jfdi project and was as much about experimenting with nifty web stuffs like jquery, processing.js and google adsense as it was about building a data visualisation piece.

that said, i hope you like it at least a little: twends