140Char

Portwiture is an interesting mash-up by Tyler Sticka, which grabs photos from Flickr which match the content of your most recent Twitter updates.

By inputting your Twitter username, a grid or slideshow is created, and you can select the number of photos, to grab photos by relevance, recency or how interesting they are.

And that’s it – as Tyler writes, it’s simply an experiment in mashing social services, using JavaScript framework jQuery and public APIs, some PHP and SlideShowPro. What is quite fun is that he’s suggested anyone who wants to discuss possible uses should do it on Twitter with the hashtag #whyportwit.

I ran my own Twitter account, and you can see the results.

Although there’s no easy embed option, an RSS feed is provided – it would be great if images could be linked to individual tweets – perhaps providing a business model if Tyler uploaded advertiser images, and then pulled them into the system alongside Flickr photos?

And if I could just embed it easily, it could become a really fun way to see Tweeple represented.

But it’s yet another example of the benefits of Open APIs and inventive people, which has fuelled Twitter so far.

There are so many interesting visualisations of data around, I almost hesitate to mention any. But Twittersheep is interesting because it takes a similar approach to Wordle, but applies it to your Twitter followers, rather than your own account.

My (@badgergravling) Twittersheep result (Click to see full size)

Which is a useful tool for seeing what friends and followers are interested in, and also handy if you need a quick and easy way to display that type of data to someone.

The other bonus is that it only requires your username, not your password.

A quick post today due to a heavy workload, but I had to mention one of the most interesting visualisations of Twitter I’ve seen in a while at Twitter StreamGraphs.

It’s a third party creation which either lets you see the last 200 tweets containing a search term, or the last 200 tweets by a username.

It’s useful, and it looks great….it’s been created by Jeff Clark, who also created TwitterArcs and TwitterSpectrum.