This is so cool. Check out my network via Mailana.
So you can put in your Twitter handle, your location or a search term like say "e-learning" and you get this awesome visual map back.
Now according to this page, this network is using something like 210 million messages from almost 400,000 people. So what's cool about all this? Well, I'm still playing around with this but I find it very interesting that when you search on a term like "e-learning" - you get a map of the active conversations on Twitter on that topic. So you get to see who is talking to who, who is most active and you can even turn and go into those conversations. That's just tremendous. What's also tremendous is that this is just a demo of what Mailana is actually supposed to do. Evidently this tool was designed to extract meaning from corporate email systems. Now I want to get it installed at work!
So now we get to the arrogant portion of the post - the part where I offer suggestions to someone as smart as Pete Warden about how to make this tool better - I want this as an AIR app...I want to see a drop down menu feature like the little gem in TweetDeck, I want that menu to allow me to follow people - maybe see their most recent tweets and so on...I want the "info" link to pop up the conversation in a side panel...
Seriously, Mr. Warden, you've got like a mild form of attention-heroin here, with a little tweaking - it could become insanely addictive.

