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Twitter as data collector

Posted Jul 20, 2009 by Jeff Scullin

Updated Jul 20, 2009 at 12:23 PM

With Nathan Yau‘s announcement last week about your.flowingdata, it seems like we can officially say that Twitter has become a serious tool for collecting data. Yau, the guy behind Flowing Data, isn’t the first to experiment with using Twitter as a tool for collecting data; but this has the feel of a watershed, and given the number of people I know who look at Yau’s Flowing Data site, this may be the point where we see serious numbers of people starting to experiment with Twitter in this way—mostly, because it’s so easy.


You can check the above link to find out more about how your.flowingdata works. In general, though, the idea is that you tweet whatever data you are tracking. For example, if you wanted to use the app to track your weight, you’d be tweating things such as, “d yfd weigh 160.” Then log on to your.flowingdata through Twitter to start visualizing your data.


What you come up with might look something like this:





As I said, Yau isn’t the first to come up with the idea of using Twitter to collect data. One I’ve started looking at is Twitter Data. Same concept.