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They say that engaging people on the web involves stimulating and maintaining conversations. These days more people and businesses than ever are “conversing” via Twitter, and more and more people are thinking about content and semantic search.

But what are all these people spending their days talking about? With what criteria do you decide to follow someone? Is one interesting message sufficient? To facilitate these decisions, the acclaimed geek-of-the-year Marco Gomes created an application called Writing About, which gives you an idea about what each Twitter user is tweeting about. The API is open and at your disposal!

Basically, Writing About analyzes a user’s tweets and summarizes what topics they have posted about lately on Twitter. “It’s a tool that identifies keywords in Twitter and classifies them according to a personalized tree of categories,” explains Marco in his blog. “Not a direct comparison like ‘terms related to technology have been found,’ but an analysis of the significance of the words in the text.” To analyze the content of someone’s tweet stream, you simply indicate their Twitter name in the field on Writing About and hit the button below!

API open to developers

The results appear in the form of categories, keywords, and the famous Whole Sort of General Mish Mash (WSOGMM) (in english here). The application is still a project, a proof-of-concept, and is not really recommended to endusers, but Marco put it up so developers can access the service, in the form of the API JSON. “This way other programmers can use it to create applications using the interpretation of tweets,” he says.

Some queries may be temporarily unavailable. Marco says they are aware of the problem, cause yet unknown. But as the project was set up in one morning (”insomniaware”), Marco has no estimate of when or if he will correct it. Be patient (if you run into a problem) and try the query later. The initiative is interesting and worth sharing as an example.

Follow Marco Gomes on Twitter.