TweetZombie — eating your brain. one tweet at a time.
TweetZombie is a site that does some very basic vocabulary analysis of an individual's Twitter messages. It will tell you the size of the vocabulary that the person uses and provide a vocabulary rating (v-rating). The exact rating calculation method is of course a closely guarded trade secret. :) (And yes, you can try to game it with antidisestablishmentarianism if you really want to do so. You wouldn't be the first.)
A handy pie chart shows you at a glance how often the person replies or retweets. Last I looked the highest rating was 51,801 and the biggest vocabulary was 1,240 words.
Applying new technologies
Development of TweetZombie was an exercise in integrating and learning more about a number of technologies. It was originally developed using Django, jQuery, the Twitter API (via tweepy) and sqlite but then ported to run on Google App Engine with Google App Engine Helper for Django and a side order of Google AdSense. (What do you mean assimilated? :) )
The porting exercise was interesting as developing for the App Engine DataStore with its non-SQL approach to queries was an exercise in changing how one thinks about data retrieval. The main change to thinking was pre-calculating more values up front.
I also took a brief look at making use of the Python Natural Language Toolkit for more sophisticated vocabulary analysis (e.g. n-grams) but have not integrated it yet.
Related Wiki Updates
During the development process I added a few related pages to my Wiki/Notebook:
- Learning About Google App Engine
- Learning About Django
- Learning About Twitter API (with Python)
- Learning About NLTK (Python Natural Language Toolkit)
- Project Log: TweetZombie
Try it yourself
Head to TweetZombie and try it on your own account or on the accounts of your friends and then brag about how superior your intelligence must be. Or something.