Conceptualisation and visualisation are truly great concepts, that’s what appealed to me initially, thinking it would be an interesting way to look at data in new and vivid ways, just as Wordle and other tools can be fun.

I was just disappointed on clicking on my topic of interest to see that the actual data under the bonnet looked like this:

http://skitch.com/sally/nuh3m/tweeder-cancer

3 tweets from one person on my random scroll. Oh. I was thinking as a former pharma marketer – how useful or interesting is that picture if I wanted to actually use the tool? How can I compare disease states broadly, or even different cancers. At the moment you can’t, so the relative scores on the left hand side don’t actually mean that much.

We all use tools that have utility, whether visual or not, but if they don’t have any rigour or complete data, then they get looked at once and forgotten about.

I’m glad my review allowed you some insight into what The Health Tweeder does whilst you were travelling. Thanks for the tweet, too

Thank you for taking the time to leave a comment. I’m not the only one looking forward to seeing what’s coming next (see above)

Thanks for stopping by! I take your point, absolutely. Perhaps I’m looking at this from the perspective of ‘what it could be’, and you’re looking at it from the perspective of ‘what it actually is’.

As we all head into the cloud and anticipate a time when much of the data we actually end up reviewing will be filtered according to our evolving preferences, it’s nice to begin to conceptualize a time when visualization tools will be added into the search mix.

As a search tool, no, The Health Tweeder is not fit for purpose, but then this is a launch product. I’m guessing by-disease state search term augmentation may be integrated into later versions. However, as a way of gesturing towards getting people to think about how data could be ordered visually in anticipation of (for example) drag and drop search, it’s a small conceptual step forward, in much the same way as @PhilBaumann’s meditations on abstracting disease states using geospatial tools like Foursquare helps us loosen the mental shackles a little.

Off to watch Minority Report now. Where did I leave those neoprene gloves?

What criteria is the tool using to search on? Are only certain Twitter handles defined as ‘kosher’ and used to select from their tweets?

In ‘cancer’ it includes mainly a couple of news outlets and one of two physicians, for example.

There’s a lot more out there! For example, I wrote a whole series of blog posts on lung and colorectal cancer from scientific conferences in January and tweeted them but none showed up in the tool, which suggests that only a few Twitter handles are being used for the search.

Also, searching on ‘cancer’ will give you mainly solid tumours and not hematologic malignancies such as leukemias, lymphomas, myelodysplastic syndrome etc, never mind the shorted acronyms in common use such as AML, NHL, CLL etc.

For me, the tool looks pretty, but by screening out much of the useful content, I’m sticking with Twitter search for more specific terms and extensive information.

A neat way to make the tool more useful and interactive would be to provide a search box so one could search for ‘lung cancer’ or even by drug names.

Best,

DJ Edgerton
CEO
Zemoga