Staggering graphs, keep ‘em coming: the Twitter edition

Written on 6th August 2008                                                                                                              1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Remember the Last.fm graphs I discussed a few weeks ago? It gave a gorgeous and insightful visualization of your music history. The master behind this technology is Lee Byron, read his explanation and motivation on his personal blog. Now another developer, Jeff Clark, has created a Twitter version called StreamGraphs:

The StreamGraph shows the usage over time for the words most highly associated with the search word. One of these series together with a time period are in a selected state and coloured red. The tweets that contain this word in the given time period are shown below the graph.

You can either enter a random search word or your username. Then StreamGraph grabs the data of the 200 latest tweets containing the keyword. See the graph in this post for the visualization of our Twitter account. Check out the launch date of the iPhone to see how accurate the visualization is.

Don’t forget to check out some earlier work of Jeff Clark, as he’s also the man behind TwitArcs and Twitter Spectrum.

data visualization, streamgraph, twitter, visualization

1 Comment »

Want free publicity? Create a Twitter mash-up like TwittEarth

Written on 2nd May 2008                                                                                                              3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Sometimes you just need a break. So do I. Then I either persuade a colleague to play some soccer in the hallway, or press the Stumble button. This afternoon I chose the latter and ended up at TwittEarth, a rather smashing visualization of the Twitter public timeline.

It’s a mash-up by Digitas France SA, who created this Twittearth for fun. Although I don’t question their motives, creating a Twitter mash-up seems like the perfect free publicity PR tool these days.

Just ask somebody to develop a 3D engine (Papervision), use an API for the geolocalization service (Yahoo!) and find some fancy icons (Fasticon). The result? Some heavy coverage on world’s largest tech blogs:

• TechCrunch: TwittEarth Makes Twitter A Global Experience
• Mashable: TwittEarth Shows Tweets From Around The World

Keep that in mind, all you web design agencies out there. Don’t spend your money on ads, just go creative with Twitter and let the blogosphere do the rest.

Europe, france, free publicity, mash-up, PR, twitter, visualization, yahoo local API

3 Comments »