Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Tweetroot -- Word Cloud App for Twitter

Tweetroot App Icon

As I was looking around for word cloud apps to add to my iPad a couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across this little cutie. Tweetroot (@TweetrootApp on Twitter) is a free iPad app that allows you to search Twitter by username, hashtag or mentions and create word clouds based on the result of your search. 

To try out the app, I started by searching for tweets based on my own Twitter name. This is the word cloud that showed up automatically:



Here's a peak at the results based on a search #edtech tweets:


Finally, I searched for tweets that mentioned my Twitter username. Some of the results were shocking:


Alright, so who's been tweeting me about underpants?! I honestly cannot remember having discussed underpants on Twitter or ever being tweeted about underpants. At all. Ever. 

In any case, you can also modify the word cloud by choosing a different color scheme, font, and/or adjusting how many phrases you want in to include in the word cloud. 

Some of the color scheme options.

Tap the pen icon to see font choices.

Choose word selection and
display preferences. 

Pressing the check mark at the bottom of the screen lets you save the word cloud to your device, upload it to a storage system, email it, or share on social media.

Save your Tweetroot word cloud
or share it on social media. 
Tweetroot would be great for classrooms or school libraries that use social media to promote their activities. For example, if you have a classroom or school library Twitter account, you could create a word cloud that shows your recent tweets. Save the word cloud and embed it in your school library's blog or on your teacher website.

Developed by rubbleDev, Tweetroot is a free iPad app. There's nothing to lose in trying it out and brainstorming ways to use this in your library or classroom.

Other word cloud iPad apps (but not for Twitter):

Word Clouds by ABCYa.com (currently free!)
Phoetic  by Design Luscinia ($0.99) - photo word cloud generator. Pretty cool stuff!
Word Cloud by Billy Core ($0.99)
Cloudart  by Richard Wilson ($0.99) - also on my iPad
TagCloud by Free Range Developers ($0.99) - available for the iPhone and the iPad
Visual Poetry by ImageChef Inc ($1.99) - More of a word collage than a word cloud but it's still fun to use. I used this app to make the Innovative Librarianship word cloud that appears in the blog header.


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