07/08/08
Twitter surfing with GraphStream
What’s new with Summize? We’re waiting! Ever since Twitter purchased Summize, a lot of folks have been wondering what sort of morphing, moving and visualizations would come out of the venture.
Twitter fans haven’t been disappointed – at least not with the latest page we’ve seen – StreamGraph, a page that visually maps the latest 200 tweets containing any given search word.
Do your own search after looking at the default word “interesting,” which loads when you land. If you don’t have a word to search on yet, simply click on one of the other words associated with interesting to get a new graph based on that word. Warning. It can get addictive.
Run out of words to search. Enter a Twitter ID preceeded by the ‘@’ symbol to find out what any given Tweetster is tweeting about. You’ll get the latest tweets from that ID along with what is essentially a word frequency chart.
SteamGraph explains it thus:
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 click on another word series or time period to see different matches. In the match list you click on any word to create a different graph with tweets containing that word. You can also click on the user or comment icons and any URL to see the appropriate content in another window.
What you get is a word-by-word tour, Twittersurfing if you would. Unless you’re a wordsmith or a keyword junkie the experience may not rank high on the useful and necessary scale, but it’s fun.
Jeff Clark created StreamGraph and if you enjoy it you’ll like TwitArcs and Twitter Spectrum as well.