Social Bearing is a Twitter based statistics website which I launched a few days ago. I started developing the site in May 2014 and it combines my interests of statistics, code and enthusiasm for the Twitter API.
The website is currently in BETA, so there are plenty of features I still want to develop over the coming months.
Any visitor to my webdevdoor.com blog may have noticed a few articles I’ve writted on the public Twitter API. At the end of 2012, I wrote about creating a custom Twitter feed that people could put on their websites. When Twitter brought in the authentication requirements for all streams, I wrote about basic authentication and have since written about caching Twitter streams, Twitter feed animation and other aspects of the API.
At the beginning of 2014, I launched a fairly simple project for a Twitter Job Search tool. Although it links externally through to the official Twitter Search, it gave me further insights into how Twitter search queries operate and how geo-located tweets can be found.
Social bearing builds on much of these ideas. When I started the project, it was initially only going to be an open search and sentiment tool for public tweets. As I started building the site and getting into the nuts and bolts of the twitter streams, I found further features I wanted to add including people search, home feed display and follower/friend analysis.
Looking at the competition and other Twitter tools was a big part in helping me understand the direction I wanted to take Social Bearing. Some of the more popular tools I evaluated include TweetReach, Topsy and Twitonomy.
The more research I did, the more I felt my approach with Social Bearing was different. I wanted to create something unique and believe I have achieved that by how tweet and user entities are displayed, summarised and filtered.
Most Twitter tools for example won’t allow you to sort tweets and have limiting filtering. Social Bearing can sort tweets by metrics including engagements, reach, followers and sentiment. Tweets can also be filtered by content type (pictures, links, mentions etc), language and top words, contributors and influencers.
Social Bearing also displays every tweet (excluding possibly sensitive tweets) that matches the search query and gives the user the option to filter less relevant tweets as they wish. Many Twitter tools seem to automatically filter the display of tweets to greater degrees before displaying to the user.
Currently Social Bearing includes the following main areas:
Each of these main areas will display a summary of the data and have the ability to filter and sort users and tweets by metrics such as engagements, reach, influence and language.
Potential uses could include:
I have a lot of new features and ideas I would like to develop for Social Bearing in the coming weeks and months. Some of these include:
It would be great to hear your feedback or any suggestions for the site. 🙂
Hi Tom.
Congratulations on a FINE piece of work. I have never seen anything else ]quite like it. The stats shown is truly amazing !
Paul
Hi guys,
it’s a great tool in my opinion! I use it for a short Twitter analyses for my master thesis.
Just one question: My search resulted in 233 tweets within a timeframe of 9 days. But it’s written that only the last 7 days are shown. So, my question is: Are the 233 tweets within the timefrome of 9 days or in the max. period of 7 days? Moreover, the counted tweets at “Tweets Over Time” sums up only to 225 tweets.
Hope to receive an answer 🙂
Best regards,
Sebastian