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The ISACA South Africa Annual conference is coming up in a few months and I though it would be pretty cool if we could have some kind of real-time visualisations of what the twitterverse (or net) was saying about the conference.

So this morning I was reading up on how best to do this and the first article I came across was 5 Ways to Visualize Twitter at Events which was on the Event Manager Blog : http://www.eventmanagerblog.com/event-management/visualize-twitter-at-events

This starts by answering the questions “A lot of fuzz is being made about if tweets should be displayed at events or not. The answer is simple, Yes! And in a fancy way.” and then proceeds to list 5 options for methods/tools that can be used to achieve this, and gives some pro’s and con’s for each.

Based on this article and the followup comments I whipped through the tools to see what might be suitable and jotted down some of my own thoughts. These are still fairly preliminary and I need to do some more investigation into features being offered and the overall robustness of the solutions.

The 4 tools I took a look at were : visibletweets, wiffiti, twazzup and twitterfountain

The tool we use (if the concept is approved)  would probably run from a laptop with a projector attached and run in an unattended fashion. I wanted to be able to select a few keywords / #hashtags, have some kind of title (or instruction) on the page, be able to add a custom background, and have cool visualisations of the results. I suspect the display is also going to have to run over a 3G connection at the conference, so it will also need to be reasonably bandwidth friendly, but that will have to be tested at a later stage.

My thoughts based on this rough criteria for each of the  options is briefly noted below :

Visible Tweets (www.visibletweets.com) Sample link

• Supports multiple keywords, tags, and exclusions
• 3 visualisation options suited for conference projections (looks great) and full screen operation (unattended)
• builds tag cloud which displays between tweets
• displays profile picture of tweeter
• simple to setup and custom URL
• No header option or custom background
• Doesn’t seem to support twitpic or other picture services
• Can make use of TidyTweet service to have filtered/moderated tweets (and prevent profanity/embarassment), $10 /month for non-personal use

Conclusion : Fairly good option, quick and easy to set up, would be better with a bit more customisation and twitpic support

Wiffiti (www.wiffiti.com)   sample link

• Allows custom background to be uploaded
• Custom title can be set
• Does censorship (can set rating level)
• Allows multiple tags
• Can use pictures from flickr with tags
• Displays tweets with profile picture, tags and location
• Accepts mesages directly from website
• Accepts SMS however is USA based short message code, not clear if could get a South African number
• Easy to set up, however required signup to “publish” the screen and save it
• Visualisation looks pretty good with multiple messages onscreen at once, full screen option

Conclusion : Very professional looking service, definitely one that could do the job.

Twazzup (www.twazzup.com) Sample Link

• looks good in a browser for individual use but doesn’t seem suitable for conference projection
• breaks the page up into different sections giving Highlights, Community Influencers, Live pictures, News, Twitter stream.
• No custom headers or backgrounds
• Seems to displays pictures (twitpic etc)
• Lists common links

Conclusion : This is great way to get a view on a topic, but not for conference projection

Twitterfountain (www.twitterfountain.com) Sample link

• does pictures in background, tweets scaled flying into background
• gives twitter profile picture, name, tweet
• link to blog top right (cant seem to remove)
• banner across top (defaults to twitterfountain) and can be customised / removed
• options for how messages animated
• background image allowed
• can change size of tweets and how they are displayed
• fullscreen option
• The URL generated for the fountain doesn’t contain all of the settings so these would have to be set up again each time

Conclusion : Also a viable option, not quite up to wiffiti, and I prefer the visualisation of visibletweets (although twitterfountain has far better customisation and does support the custom backdrops and banner whereas visibletweets doesn’t)

Summary (for now)

Each of these products is great in its own right, having a time and place where it may be the most suitable. For the conference I would tend to think either visibletweets (using tidytweet) or wiffiti would be the best options, though twitterfountain still needs a bit more investigation. More to come later.