Listen in on real-time talk about innovation (and more)

Tuesday, August 25, 2009 | Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories: Technology | Tags: innovation, chart, Twitter, investors, real-time, StreamGraph, Neoformix, conversation, invention, inventors, graph

Innovators, investors and inventors – and, no doubt, lots of other types beginning with ‘I’ – need to keep their ear to the ground. How can you do that in a fun way? With this new Twitter infographic, you can tune into real-time conversation just by typing in a keyword.

Input a word – I’ve used ‘invention’ here – and the last 1,000 ‘tweets’ containing your search word and related discussion words are charted in a graph format. Click on any related word in the graph and this brings up the conversational ‘tweets’ – some of them admittedly inane, as you’d expect on Twitter, but many do feature interesting links.

For example, ‘stupid + invention’ brought up the story of a ‘self-playing harmonica’.

A StreamGraph for ‘inventor’, meanwhile, showed a big spike where people were talking about the death of Les Paul, one of the 20th century’s leading music innovators.

More intriguing was ‘bubbles’ appearing as a popular discussion word on the ‘inventor’ graph. A quick click brought up the story of an inventor who has spent 15 years creating the world’s first stainless colour bubbles.

You will get a different graph every time you search for a word as it is documenting real-time conversation. The graph can be opened up and expanded using the two bars on the vertical axis, so you can effectively zoom in on a conversation. Time periods appear on the horizontal axis.

While you can probably track such words more efficiently using other Twitter applications, a StreamGraph is a rather nice visual way to seek out new discoveries – and eavesdrop on real-time innovation chatter.

Click here to create your own StreamGraph.

Image: Neoformix