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The Microsoft Fuse Labs are introducing four new social media widgets to help you visualize Twitter data and embed them on your website.

Some say a picture is worth a thousand words. And when analyzing the massive amounts of data generated by Twitter, this adage could not be more appropriate. FUSE Labs’ SocialGadgets are a set of embeddable widgets that visualize Twitter real-time data. Each gadget focuses on a given keyword and displays its volume of usage over time. Mentioned entities such as people, locations, companies and noun phrases are identified and visually represented. The gadgets are interactive, letting users explore the relationships between topics publically shared on Twitter. By focusing on patterns and trends, the gadgets can extrapolate what people find important, and provide a succinct yet effective way to look at events as they are unfolding.

I can think of no better way to show you how they work than by embedding them in this post.  Each of these have some level of interaction that is possible so click around on terms to see what happens.  Be careful of the rabbit hole!

Tag Cloud Widget – Given a keyword, this gadget displays a visual tag cloud depicting main entities found in the given time period and their relative time and volume of appearance.

Timeline Widget – A timeline centric display of related terms and their volume of appearance during a chosen period of time.

Buzz Widget – Given a keyword, this gadget highlights the buzz around a specific person, profile or topic. This is an ideal template to embed in a blog or profile page sidebar.

Comparison Widget – Volume of appearance of 2-3 terms are displayed on the same timeline. This is great way to compare levels of buzz around topics and identify major points in time where some topics spiked.