TweetHeroes is a Twitter app that discovers and ranks influential users tweeting on specific topics. We built it to make sense of the conversations, players, and networks in Twitter. We know about wefollow, Klout, twitaholic, and Twitalyzer among others. They just didn’t show us what we wanted to see or how we wanted to see it. So we built our own social media analytics thingy. Here are three ways you can use it.

Want to know the central players in networks that are tweeting about Boston, Seattle, Ottawa or 30 other North American cities? How about political networks like the Tea Party or Gov 2.0? Check out our topic-specific ranking pages like this one for New York City:

It’s 2:10 AM (MDT). As I write this, Calgary influentials are tweeting about #yycvote; Portland influentials are tweeting about the Farmers Market; and Gov 2.0 influentials are tweeting about the First Mass Mobile Alert System. How do I know this? I checked the topic-specific stream page like this one show below for Austin, Texas:

TweetHeroes profiles tell you what you need to know about influential Twitter users — including you. Who are your influential followers? What are your popular tweets? Who retweets you the most? How often are you being mentioned? Where are your followers from? These are just some of the questions answered by our profiles. The profile below is for Boston tweeter Laura Fitton, aka Pistachio.

That’s just the basics. We’ve made good progress over the past few months. And we have much more in store — more topics, more features. Look up profiles, tell us what you think, and please stay tuned.

Update: Twitter Analytics is almost ready for prime-time. The features we’ve seen in the sneak peek incorporate most of what we set out to do with TweetHeroes. So we’ve decided to stop development on this project and take it offline. It was a fun detour and we learned a lot about Twitter data and social network analysis. But we’re moving on. Thanks to everyone who had a look.