A big thanks to Eric Rumsey, who hipped me to the Twitter Venn search result mapping tool. You can try it out at http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitterVenn/view.php .

Basically it’s a Java applet that lets you enter in search terms and see how those terms overlap in Twitter. I entered Twitter and Business I got two circles showing the volume of each of those results, with an overlapping area showing the volume of Tweets with both of those words. Click on the either circle or the overlap and you’ll get a basic cloud of the most prevalent words from the returned tweets in the lower-right corner. In this case, the overlap between the two queries included words like kill, small, use, tool, and even hmmmm. Tweets themselves appear at the bottom of the applet.

I tried overlapping the terms new and Twitter and found that the overlapped area had words like followers, check, ideas, day, and crazy. And there was even a Twitter name in there — @GaryMccaffrey .

Besides being a lot of fun to play with, I can imagine using the Twitter Venn tool to scout useful words to employ while doing searching, or for ideas while creating Twitter search streams to follow in an RSS feed reader.

If you like Twitter Venn, check out some other projects by the same guy, including TwitArcs (http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitArcs/TwitArcs.html, Twitter Spectrum (http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitterSpectrum/TwitterSpectrum.html, I liked this one), and TwitterStreamGraphs.)