Twitter is an unbelievable tool for getting the sense of what’s going and what’s being said at any given moment.  It truly is a tool for measuring “the pulse” of any event.”  One of the greatest things about twitter is that it’s completely free form.  There’s really no rules – as long as the content crams into 140 characters, it can be said.  As a result, the data within twitter has become very chronological.  A stream of unrelated tweets, with no real surrounding context.

No where is this felt more than at Conferences where organizers are beginning to use twitter to broadcast on projectors what the audience is saying.  This is great in theory, but there’s still no real structure of the data.  It’s just a stream of tweets, bound by a hashtag with no real context.

I attended a Startup Weekend in Palo Alto last week and formed a team which tried to solve this problem.  Here’s the presentation … Pardon the number of “Um”‘s … I really need to learn to speak better publicly.