Cloud.li Makes Twitter Searches Visual

Back in the day I used to swear by great tool to help me get over writer’s block: the Visual Thesaurus. Often all it took was seeing words similar to the one I was stuck on swirling around the screen to get my brain going again. I still use it all the time, and now there is a similar online tool just to help with Twitter searches: Cloud.li.

Cloud.li works with simple Boolean terms, so you can enter a word or phrase, and exclude tweets that have certain words if you want to. I started with the word “travel,” and excluded “business.” Results appear on a simple page in a tag cloud, and clicking a related term–I chose “Seattle”–brings up tweets that have both “Seattle” and “travel” in them. From there, the Twitter world is wide open

If you’re looking for information on a topic and aren’t quite sure of the best terms right off the bat, Cloud.li might be a good place to start.  The site also has a useful bookmarklet–just drag it to your browser tool bar, and on any web page you can highlight a word, and click the bookmarklet to immediately bring up the search results cloud in a new window. The next time you see a term pop up repeatedly on a blog, for instance,  this is a quick way to get more information.

It’s so easy to go straight to Google, type in a term, and hope for the best. Nine times out of ten, this approach works just fine. But with Twitter growing as fast as it is, and combined with the ability to instantly see and join conversation around a topic, you get the benefit of additional context a lot faster than with a traditional search. And of course,  it’s not bad for if you’re just killing time online either.

For more on Cloud.li, follow the developer Elbert F. on Twitter.