Mashup Magic: TwitterThoughts

Written by Phil Glockner / March 3, 2009 6:30 PM / 13 Comments

Yvo Schaap is a 23 year old student in the Netherlands who spends at least some of his time developing ways to visualize information. More specifically, he has been working with the open Twitter API and generating some amazing informatics visuals from the resulting output. Plus, the tools and methods he uses to get the visuals is almost a lesson in new media artistry.

Let's look at TwitterThoughts first. Here, Yvo takes a live Twitter API stream, parses it through a Yahoo! Pipes process, dumps the result in a giant MySQL database, then he uses the Google Visualization API to render the output as an interactive Flash chart. A lot of the heavy lifting here is done in the cloud, in freely available utilities. And the result? Let's say Edward Tufte would feel comfortable putting it in his book, Envisioning Information.

Keep in mind that this is just a screenshot of a live Flash application. You have a number of variables to toy with on each axis, plus full control over the timeline slider. Also, you have two separate views. Overall, we spent a lot of time just clicking on data points, adjusting sliders, and watching progressions. It's endlessly fascinating.

Yvo also generates some other visuals from the data he extracts from the Twitter API, such as the World Twitter Map. In this mashup, different areas have different sized bubbles to indicate their level of activity on Twitter. We couldn't help but notice that the map has a 'zoom out' button but no visible way of zooming in.

Overall, we believe Yvo is doing some groundbreaking work here and fully leveraging the potential of public information management tools such as Pipes and the Google Visualization API. Bravo Yvo! We can't wait to see what you have in store for us next.

Comments

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whoa, whats going on in northern Canada?

Posted by: twitter fan | March 3, 2009 6:54 PM

us, uk and japan!
amazing result

Posted by: at9t | March 3, 2009 7:13 PM

Go Japan! Reminds me of work by Jonathan Harris. Watch his TED presentations.

Looking fwd to google (or someone) offering an analytic tool for social media.

I want one app to follow and record the stats from my businesses communities.

Broken down by social groups, e,g twitter, face, thisnext...

Just like web build companies are everywhere, next will be community management companies (for the SEM's of course)

sorry for long comment...

Posted by: Elliot Alexander | March 3, 2009 7:56 PM

Just because it's infographics doesn't mean Tufte would be a fan of it. For those that actually read and understand his work - the first graph is a bit of a mess, and breaks a number of Tufte's rules.

Posted by: Ross | March 3, 2009 8:37 PM

Very cool. Thanks for sharing Phil!

Posted by: Edwin Khodabakchian | March 3, 2009 8:37 PM

I have to agree with Ross here, not sure how you can even mention Tufte in this entry just because someone put a chart and map together. There are definitely better ways to present this data and to even hint that Tufte could include either of these in his great books is insulting and shows you really don't know Tufte. That first chart is a complete mess.

With that said it's cool what you can do with APIs nowadays. Interesting to see how far this kid takes it.

Posted by: Paul Scrivens | March 4, 2009 2:03 AM

@Paul
@Ross

I agree with both of you. It is a mess and there is nothing novel in his approach. However, I must admit that he used multiple APIs nicely.

Posted by: Dj | March 4, 2009 6:30 AM

Another use of the location-based Twitter API is at http://nearbytweets.com

Posted by: Brian Cray | March 4, 2009 7:50 AM

I was pretty excited when I wrote this piece, and perhaps invoking Tufte was a reach, I'll admit that. Jonathan Harris would perhaps have been a better comparison (thanks Elliot).

My intent was not to *offend* him or you guys, it was more to invoke the spirit of striving toward a banner of great works -- something that often seems vanishingly rare when it seems all anyone wants to talk about is who the top tweeters are, and what they had for lunch.

If you do find a new media work that more closely resembles the approach Tuft outlines, please do let me know at our tips email address (tips@readwriteweb.com) or mine directly, (phil@readwriteweb.com).

Posted by: Phil Glockner | March 4, 2009 7:59 AM

This is great stuff Yvo !
Do you have a number on twitter-activity for the Netherlands ?
Please state your twitter-account so we could discuss some of it on wtitter.

Greetz Lucien

@zorg20 on twitter

Posted by: Lucien | March 4, 2009 8:02 AM

Thanks for the mention and nice words Phil!

Posted by: Yvo | March 6, 2009 7:10 AM

There are so many creative mashups popping up. It's awesome to see developers pushing the envelope. We look forward to seeing more mashups.

http://www.sparxoo.com

Posted by: david | March 9, 2009 3:31 PM