Twitter Graphs

Posted by: Cate on: October 9, 2009

• In: Twitter | Visualization
• 33 Comments

UPDATE 9/10: Insight into how this works and the rationale behind this in this post.

So after my last post I received a couple of graph requests.

Here’s @map_maker‘s, see how I’ve added the directionality. This one took a long time to build. She talks to a lot of people who talk to a lot of people…

@map_maker's Twitter Conversation Network

And @emdaniels.

@emdaniels Twitter Conversation Network

This is my boyfriends, @theAlMan. He doesn’t talk to that many people, so I dared to go to a depth of 2.

@theAlMan's Twitter Conversation Network: Depth 2

My very popular neighbor, @snookca (depth 1 again). He caused a stack overflow…

@snookca's Twitter Conversation Network

@Circuitbomb (depth 1).

@Circuitbomb's Twitter Conversation Network

@uOttawaWISE – we’ve not been on Twitter long, but our network is growing! Also – because this one is fairly small you can see the connections really nicely.

@uOttawaWISE Twitter Conversation Network

@bitswt02

@bitswt02's Twitter Conversation Network

@chrisboivin:

@chrisboivin's Twitter Conversation Network

@jaxama:

@jaxama's Twitter Conversation Network

@cheth (another one to cause a stack overflow!):

@cheth's Twitter Conversation Network

@sparkyourart (another stack overflow!):

@sparkyourart's Twitter Conversation Network

Sorry for the delay – I’ve been tweaking my algorithm to produce more balanced graphs. It now takes your last 200 tweets and last 100 mentions (due to search limitations this means there will not be any older than a week) and finds the oldest ID in each set. Then it takes the maximum of these and ignores any tweets older than this ID. I’ve also added node distance coloring, so that the central node is darkest and nodes further from the central node are lighter.

Here’s how my graph looks now (let me know what you think!):

My Twitter Conversation Graph with distance coloring and algorithm modifications

So, @velvetescape and @velvetconnect come next. After hitting the API limit a couple of times (even after I’d tweaked the algorithm – @velvetescape talks to and about a lot of people) I had to do these a little differently. For @velvetescape I changed the depth to 0 so it’s just him and the people he talks to and who talk about him. For someone with this much conversation going on, though, I think it shows it pretty nicely.

@velvetescape's Twitter Conversations - Depth 0

For @velvetconnect I just changed the number of recent tweets I request from the API. Normally I get 200 most recent tweets and the last 100 (or week) of mentions but this just wasn’t feasible so I cut these both in half.

@velvetconnect's Twitter Conversation Network (reduced data from API)

@EarleyDaysYet:

@EarleyDaysYet's Twitter Conversation Network

@jdemond‘s is below. This one is nice – you can really see he’s part of two distinct networks, and that the network to the right has some sub-networks going on.

@jdemond's Twitter Conversation Network

@tipexxed:

@tipexxed's Twitter Conversation Network

@boristopia:

@boristopia's Twitter Conversation Network

@CozyCabbage:

@CozyCabbage's Twitter Conversation Network

@LALALAMBRIT:

@LALALAMBRIT's Twitter Conversation Network

@wandywanz:

@wandywanz Twitter Conversation Network

@dlitz:

@dlitz's Twitter Conversation Network

@KristinaThorpe – this one was interesting! I didn’t hit the API limit but I did run into problems with the visualization engine that prevented it from rendering – not sure why, but I think it may be due to the graph being very densely connected. I reduced the API data by 25% (last 150 tweets, last 75 mentions) and that fixed it!

@KristinaThorpe's Twitter Conversation Network

Graphs continued on this page.

If you want your graph done, let me know via Twitter or in the comments and I’ll put it up here for you. Feel free to use the image anywhere you’d like (ask me for a higher quality one if you need to), but please link back to this! Thanks 🙂