Twitterment

I just noticed the announcement of Twitterment on the eBiquity blog. Twitterment is a brand new Twitter search engine and buzz tracking system. Twitterment provides a search interface over an index of recent updates obtained periodically from the public timeline API.

I submitted several queries to evaluate the possibilities of Twitterment. Twitterment offers the possiblity to compare the buzz for two search strings. I tried to track a specific trend : how often are people discussing work and sleep ? I tracked these words in different languages, in English of course, but also in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German and Dutch (my mother tongue). The results are rather different.

Persons twittering in English talk more often about work than about sleep. The time pattern does not reveal real peaks during the day. This is perhaps due to the fact that lots of people, scattered worldwide are using English in there messages.


For French it seems that there is very clear preference for sleep (dormir). The word "dormir" is however also a valid word in other languages, e.g. Spanish and Portuguese. As all graphs in this post show the absolute number of tweets, the only valid conclusion is that Twitter is only used by a small number of people using French to talk about work. A comparision between sleep and work is not possible.


For Spanish speaking twitters, work (trabajar) is a little bit more popular than it is for French speeking twitters. Sleep however remains more popular.


To talk about work is For Portuguese speaking twitters as unpopular as it is for French speeking twitters.


It seems that Italians do not prefer to talk about work, but rather about going to sleep (or not going to sleep ...). This conclusion is again based on a very low number of messages.


Persons using German (in countries such as Germany, Austria or Switserland) apparantly discuss work and sleep in about the same frequency. The number of messages is again very low.


For Dutch, in the morning work ("werken") is more often talked about, whereas going to sleep is popular in the evening. Timings in the graphs are in EST, not in European time.


My main conclusion is that English is the most dominant language, in comparison to the selected languages. Twitterment is a very handy tool to perform the kind of comparisons as discussed in this post.