I did a post, Twitter Enters the Enterprise?, that was a bit provocative and stirred up a bunch of Twitter supporters. I think it got more comments that anything I have written on this blog but I have not been keeping track. I recently co-presented on new media for leaders at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government with my friend Cesar Brea. Cesar is a Twitter user (see Twying Out Twitter) and confirmed that Twitter users can be passionate. He presented an interesting mashup, Twittervsion, that combines Twitter with Google Maps so you can see where people are using Twitter around the world and what they are saying (should they opt in to participate).

He described some interesting applications of this mashup in his post, Twittervision: From Cool, To Tool. “Picture scenarios that filter Twittervision into logical groups (pre-defined groups of people watching a webcast, or people linking and reacting to news, for example). Now picture further parsing the Twitter posts for the occurrence of keywords signaling reactions, a la We Feel Fine, and then mapping those occurrences to a heat map overlay on the Twittervision Google Map. What emerges is an “evolving geospatialized map of emotional reaction to events”.

Cesar demonstrated how this might work at our session. The application, We Feel Fine, provides the heat. It is an application developed by a few former Googleites. That lets you see what feelings are occurring on the web. It has a data collection engine that automatically scours the Internet every ten minutes, harvesting human feelings from a large number of blogs. The blog data comes from a variety of online sources, including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google. We Feel Fine scans blog posts for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling” and then looks to see if it includes one of 5,000 pre-identified “feelings” to gauge the temperature of these blogs. While there will be obvious “mistakes” the law of large numbers should smooth that out.

I think is a great example of the creativity that mashups allow. The breakthroughs will likely often come from the fourth or fifth generation iteration of the combinations that go beyond the vision of the originators. The ease of development allows for these extensions.