A Retweet Mapping Tool Emerges

I just stumbled upon a new tool that maps out the re-tweets occurring on Twitter. It’s called, simply, the ReTweet Mapper. (Actually, I didn’t Stumble Upon it, I found it on FriendFeed, of course.)

The ReTweet Mapper is a tool created by Dan Zarrella, who calls himself a social and viral marketing scientist. He describes his creation as a system that indexes all the “ReTweets” and maps them to each other in a visual display. Dan says the system is still pretty rough, but he gives us a good idea of what it looks like:

The tweet streams are hierarchical, collapsible structures showing how the tweets and re-tweets are related. In addition to the ReTweet mapping tools, you can also search ReTweets or view the most ReTweeted users.

Given the recent dustup over Twitter and authority, it’s worth taking a look at any system that attempts to find some sort of signal within the noise of Twitter. You may or may not agree that re-tweets are a good indication of importance, but they can certainly show you what’s hot at the moment.

Still, what I personally want is an RSS feed that shows me the top re-tweets occurring on Twitter in real-time. Does anyone have anything like that?

Update: Oh wait, found the tool, where’s the RSS?: http://www.retweetradar.com