ChatterTrack

ChatterTrack project from the Collaborative Innovation class Spring 2013.

What it does

Politicians are more polished and media savvy than ever. They're skilled at delivering their message on any platform — print, broadcast and online. ChatterTrack is an attempt to step out of the message machine and learn more about politicians by looking at what their supporters are talking about.

ChatterTrack pulls tweets from the followers of politicians, analyzes them, and then divides them into categories — sports, politics, business, technology, health, food, etc. It then displays the topics followers discuss most in a bar graph, allowing allows users to drill down into each category to learn more about the tweets surrounding politicians. A curiosity tool, ChatterTrack gives people an interesting way to explore the passions of people who follow public figures.

How it works

The app sends requests to Twitter for tweets of followers of any public account. The server sends tweets to Datasift, which filters requests based on provided parameters and sends them back to ChatterTrack. ChatterTrack uses an in-house categorizer to analyze tweets and divide each in to categories.

Next Steps

The builders of ChatterTrack imagined a few possibilities for future development, including:

• Real time tracking of tweets to produce a more meaningful and timely analysis
• Greater capacity to serve a greater number of users at once.