Have you been using Twitter for a while? Curious about some trends in your own language usage with this short status message format? I was.

Recently a few Twitter profile backgrounds have caught my eye; backgrounds with colourful, unique word clouds. It quickly became clear what was going on; these profile backgrounds were visual representations of these Twitter user's most commonly used words.

My search to achieve something similar led me to Wordle, an online tool that can be used to create a visually appealing word cloud, via an RSS feed, a big list of words, along with other methods.

Unfortunately my Twitter's RSS feed (understandably!) is only so long, so that wasn't the key. This is where TweetStats steps in. An interesting service on it's own, TweetStats not only lets you see some great statistics such as when you're tweeting (time of day / weekdays / months) but, handily in this case, a list of your most common words that hooks up directly to Wordle!

So what's the verdict? My own personal top five words: rt, new, good, time, nice. Damn, I was hoping awesome would be in there - clearly I need to jazz things up! How'd the Solutions Outsourced Twitter go? See for yourself:

I thought foosball would be much more heavily represented somehow! We'll have to try harder.

I wonder what the word cloud would be of the lyrics of my favourite 100 songs? Didn't some bloke say that "the unanalysed life is not worth living"? I'm not sure about that, but it is certainly interesting to check out statistics like this. Who knows, perhaps they'll help shape your wordsmithing efforts for the better?