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.
Animated visualization maps a week’s worth of tweets sent between Twitter employees
The amount of publicly-available data available on Twitter, and a new data-visualization tool really hammers that home — developer Santiago Ortiz has mapped out the relationships between every Twitter employee based on their tweets to each other. Ortiz used Twitter’s API to pull all the tweets authored by Twitter employees for a one-week period, and then filtered those tweets by only those made between employees.
The Melting Pot Of New York, Seen In Its Multilingual Tweets
Mapping the languages of everyone using Twitter in New York shows the insane diversity of the city’s spoken languages and also where both tourists and local foreign language speakers are congregating.
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.
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.
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.
I visualized different facts of Twitter in (for example) relation to the time, when it “happended”. There are also relations within the 9 subjects on Twitter I chose (marked in different colors). The visualization itself is pretty simple. 9 subjects (on the outside circle) with their inner theme (e.g. percents, numbers, …) relating to the inner circle, which works as timeline, as long as the facts were available.
When the world sleeps, based on Twitter activity
Twitter engineers Miguel Rios and Jimmy Lin explored tweet volumes in different cities and found some interesting tidbits about how people use the service.
Doodling With a Conversation, or Retweet, Data Sketch Around LAK12
How can we represent conversations between a small sample of users, such as the email or SMS converstations between James Murdoch’s political lobbiest and a Government minister’s special adviser (Leveson inquiry evidence), or the pattern of retweet activity around a couple of heavily retweeted individuals using a particular hashtag?
Darwin’s Theory Pervades Twitter Too
via The Atlantic:
In a new paper entitled Competition Among Memes in a World With Limited Attention, Indiana University researchers Lillian Weng, Alessando Flammini, Alessando Vespignani, and Filippo Menczer analyzed 120 million retweets connected to 12.5 million users and 1.3 million hashtags in order to model how information (as discrete units, or memes) disperses on the social network.
What did they find? According to co-author Vespignani, having millions of followers does not denote an important message. Rather, the messages with the most immediate relevance tend to have a higher probability of resonating within a certain network than others. Think of it as “survival of the fittest” for information: those tweets that capture the most attention, whether related to a major geopolitical or news event or a particular interest, are likely to persist longer. This competition sounds bad, but it’s generally good for messages in general: thousands of tweets about Japan’s 2011 earthquake or the ongoing conflict in Syria don’t cancel each other out, but help refocus the attention of the wider Twitter audience on those issues, which in turn provides an added lift to individual messages over other off-topic ones.
The study reinforces what most journalists and marketers have known intuitively for some time now: that piggybacking on the trending ideas that constitute “the conversation” online maximizes the ability to spread tweet-sized ideas. Where people fit into preexisting networks certainly matters: Ashton Kutcher’s millions of followers represent a powerful hub of connections. But could Mr. Kutcher’s messages about Nikon’s new camera overwhelm hundreds of tweets about Trayvon Martin from hundreds of smaller, less-connected individuals? The research suggests that it doesn’t fully matter who you are or how many connections you have, but what you’re saying relative to the existing conversation is what really matters in spreading knowledge online.
FJP: Though not a shocking revelation, it does feel nice to see research support the power of Twitter.
