The daily twittersphere continues to remind us of the changing landscape of media and how we consume information. There's an inordinate amount of raw, unorganized information and insight that captures the analogy of drinking from a fire hose. To remedy the situation, the folks at FUSE Labs built a set of social gadgets that have been around for a while that I thought would be worth highlighting. They're neat little tools that can help visually  comprehend of all this information and quickly transform it into some level of understanding.

In all, there are four fully embeddable gadgets, each of which highlights a different way to dynamically look at Twitter data:

 

 

 

  • The Tag Cloud (above) lets you enter a topic, such as “Windows Phone” and see the volume of traffic, the timespan during which discussion has taken place, and a list of related topics that people are talking about - no surprise to see Nokia, Mango and Android in there.

 

  • The Timeline (above) shows you how a given topic’s popularity has been trending over time (three days, three hours or the last 60 minutes).

 

 

  • A Comparison (above) gadget allows you to size up the volume of discussion for up to three terms.

 

 

  • And the Buzz gadget shows the number of mentions a particular Twitter handle has received over a period of time, and where those mentions appeared.

 

Using them is a breeze and there's no setup or ongoing subscription fee....they're free :)  With little to no effort you can quickly identify the main elements of whatever discussion or topic you care about and share that understanding with others. I’ll warn you, though. It can be a bit addictive!