A quick tweet can blast through Twitter like wildfire. All it takes is a click of a button and anyone can help push that 140 character shout just a little further through cyberspace, until everybody knows. This is what it looks like when that happens.
“Where Does My Tweet Go” is a neat little Twitter analytics tool developed by France’s MFG Labs. It’s a very simple concept; instead of just telling you how many times one of your tweets (or someone else’s) got retweeted, it traces the viral spread from person to person to person, ever outward to Twitter’s furthest reaches.
Each graph starts with a dot in the centre for the original tweet, with a ring around it for the first wave of retweets. Each concentric circle represents yet another wave, like ripples in a pond, while the pie-slices emanating from each tweet show the overall reach of every echo.
For the moment, the service is still in beta, so your choice of tweets is rather limited. You can sign up and look at the spread of your own (if you’re popular enough) or browse through some of the (mostly French) accounts and trends the service currently supports. Eventually, it should roll out to the net at large, giving some colour and shape to ever-increasing retweet frenzies. Too bad that hacked AP tweet isn’t loaded into the beta. That would be a tweetsplosion worth seeing. Maybe (but hopefully not) next time. [Where Does My Tweet Go via Wired]