Robb Montgomery

Are your Twitter followers just like you?
I have about 300 people who follow my inane tweets and a new Web service is helping me learn more about them. Twittersheep is a lightweight Web service that tells you more about all of those hundreds of “followers” who can’t wait to be informed that you are, you know, standing in line in Starbucks or waiting for a bus in the snow.

Ever curious, I had to see what more I could learn about my Twitter followers. Compared to my old friend and powertweeter, @matmansfield, it seems that don’t really tweet that much and find that I only follow about 60 people and blog feeds. At 60, I found I could actually read and keep up with what the people I am following are saying.

What do you know - my peeps are tweets like me!

I entered my Twitter username and Twittersheep scanned the profiles of my posse and organized their keywords into a surrpisingly useful tag cloud. Turns out they are just like me - as awkwardly revealing as that may be.

This is a word cloud generated from the bios of @robbmontgomery’s followers.

Pretty interesting and for a comparison.
This is the word cloud from followers of my old pal, Matt Mansfield’s twitter feed.
Matt has over 10,000 updates posted and he follows 800 people and has about 873 followers.

Matt Mansfield is a Northwestern University journalism professor and the president of the Society for News Design this year. He is tweeting from Syracuse at the SND design competition where newspaper designs from 2008 are being judged at this moment.

If you like newspaper design, the Twitter hashtag will allow you to follow along with events in Syracuse is #snd30