I’ve been using the microblogging service Twitter for about 9 months. In that time span, I’ve becoming increasingly dependent on it as a source for professional dialogue. I find that the daily tweets from the people I am following to be an invaluable tool for staying up-to-date on a large range of topics.

Does Twitter have some drawbacks? Yes. Is the @back-and-forth banter sometimes annoying? Of Course. But overall, the pros outweigh the cons by far. In fact, outside of Plurk, I’d say that Twitter is the most important component in my quest to stay on top of all things educational technology and it has played a huge part in the development of my international personal learning network.

Today, a fellow Ohio educational technologist, Toby Fischer (@futureofedu), tweeted about his Twitter usage he discovered using a pretty cool Twitter app, TweetStats. The tagline from the website reads, “In ur Tweets, Graphin' Your Stats!” Basically, TweetStats allows users to enter a Twitter username and then renders a number of graphical representations of the user data as well as providing a TweetCloud compiled from the text of your tweets. Again, from the TweetStats site:
Graph your Twitter Stats including:
Tweets per hour
Tweets per month
Tweet timeline
Reply statistics Take a look at my TweetStats and see if it offers any insight into the life of @brueckj23.