The most excellent Tumblr of the Sunlight Foundation
When Your Twitter Friend Turns Out To Be The Boston Bomber
We live in a networked age, where you can be found not only through the data trails that you leave behind, but also based on the patterns around your network – who you’re connected to. A lot can be inferred about someone just by looking at their friends and how they’re interconnected on social networks. But what happens when one of your Twitter connections happens to be one of the alleged Boston Marathon bombers?
This is how jittery financial markets are, in one chart
The official Twitter account of the Associated Press was hacked, the AP reported, and the hacker tweeted out that there had been a White House explosion.
The evolution of discussion around the Boston Marathon events
When the Esri DC Dev Center team first found out about the reported explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, we immediately tuned into Twitter to capture live discussions so that we could understand the series of events. With over 440,000 tweets captured in under 24 hours, one can imagine the difficulty in trying to synthesize an understanding of how events occurred over that time period.
This Week in Social Analytics on Tumblr | From ComScore’s 2013 U.S. Digital Future in Focus:
“Three social networks in particular – Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram – each gained more than 10 million visitors over the course of the year in part by catering to a desire for more visually appealing content. comScore has called this phenomenon “the rise of the visual web.” Of the three, Tumblr had the largest audience at 30.8 million visitors (up 64 percent from the prior year), while Pinterest (up 284 percent to 28.9 million visitors) and Instagram (up 284 percent to 27.4 million visitors) both shared the same outsized growth rate.”
The first graph above shows the shares for time spent on each site, with Tumblr coming in second behind Facebook, while the second shows the total unique visitor trend with Tumblr trending above both Pinterest and Instagram.
You can download the full report at the link at the top of this post.
The Sandy effect: how Manhattan looks on Foursquare after a hurricane
Popular check-in app Foursquare offers great data, showing the places people visit at any given time of day. The data tells a compelling story, especially for events like Hurricane Sandy.
Take a look at a visualization of check-ins in Manhattan on the Saturday prior to the storm and on Wednesday Oct. 31, days after Sandy hit. This really drives home how Sandy created two towns within Manhattan.
Famous Failures (by Stamen)
“Watch a Facebook Photo Go Viral”
Joern Roeder & Jonathan Pirnay - Facebook Faces (2011)
This is an installation of over 100,000 Facebook profile pictures collected to form a wallpaper, a project dealing with “the issue of data accessibility on the Internet, a topic that is gaining more and more importance and actuality, especially in our times of privacy protection and social networks.
On the one hand internet giants like Google are coming under criticism for unsolicitedly collecting any information accessible; on the other hand it is surprising how many intimacies we reveal voluntarily, especially in social networks like Facebook.
An unimaginable flood of images with self-projection as its only purpose.”
Data sculpture shows emotional response to Olympics
During the Olympics, Studio NAND, Moritz Stefaner, and Drew Hemment tracked Twitter sentiment with Emoto. This interactive installation and data sculpture is the last leg of the project.
TIME now tracking the movers and shakers of the political conventions via foursquare
As part of their partnership with foursquare, TIME has launched a new feature on their Republican National Convention site that tracks the politicians, speakers and reporters via foursquare as they travel around the city of Tampa. A similar one is planned for Charlotte.
Character social networks in movies
We’ve seen a lot of network charts for Twitter, Facebook, and real people. Screw that. I want to see social networks for movie characters. That’s where Movie Galaxies comes in.
Visualization of Twitter chatter about the Olympics as compared to the NASA Mars landing. It’s great to see so many people excited about science! Created using TopicWatch.
This is Now project is a visual composition which uses real-time updates from the ever popular Instagram application based on users geo-tag locations. The tool streams photos instantly as soon as they are uploaded on Instagram and captures a cities movement, in a fluid story.
Twitter Launches Political Index: The Twitter Pulse Of The Election
Right now, if you want to know how the country feels about Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, you have to rely on pundits’ intuitions or traditional opinion polls, conducted as they always have been — by phone, over the course of hours or days. There’s no direct way to check the pulse of millions of actual people, simultaneously and directly, second by second.
Twitter is launching a tool today that it says will fill that gap, and sort through the 400 million tweets a day from 140 million active users. Twitter and real-time search engine Topsy are launching the “Twitter Political Index,” a daily assessment of how Twitter feels about Obama and Romney, in an election cycle that’s being played out moment-to-moment on the social service.
