Infographic: How to Get Better Grades Using Social Media
3:30 pm
Microsoft Fuse Labs releases Social Gadgets
1:31 pm
Microsoft’s Fuse Labs has released their collection of “Social Gadgets”, a few interactive widgets that analyze Twitter Streams. Above, see their “Tag Cloud” visualization of a search for “VizWorld”.
FUSE Labs’ SocialGadgets are a set of embeddable widgets that visualize Twitter real-time data. Each gadget focuses on a given keyword and displays its volume of usage over time. Mentioned entities such as people, locations, companies and noun phrases are identified and visually represented. The gadgets are interactive, letting users explore the relationships between topics publically shared on Twitter. By focusing on patterns and trends, the gadgets can extrapolate what people find important, and provide a succinct yet effective way to look at events as they are unfolding.
Now, I’ll cut them some slack because 1) it’s new, and 2) it’s still kinda beta.. But I easily see several issues:
- What is that bottom graph? The axis goes from 0 to 1.. Is that some count of tweets? Retweets? some statistical percentage? I don’t know. A search for “vizworld” at search.twitter.com fills the entire front page and only goes back 20 hours, so I obviously have more than 1 search result.
- For a “tag” cloud, it’s pulling up more usernames than hashtags.
- Where is it getting this data? I don’t see any of those accounts in my research search history for “vizworld”. And it leaves out the most common users who retweet my stuff like ebruhwiler and tssveloso.
My only guess is that they are unable to really keep up with all the data coming out of Twitter, so they must be missing large chunks. That or their algorithms are completely hosed.
Either way, go check out their gadgets and see what your results are, and share in the comments! Is “vizworld” an isolated case?
Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 20/09/2010
7:00 am
Surfing the web can get really addictive. Intac shows us the main health issues we face when we overdue our time on the internet. Nowmedia teach us how to never loose an important article, and designer Rosaura Ochoa breaks down the top Twitter apps by users. From Focus comes the current state of Cloud Computing, and Mashable brings the status of charity and technology in the online universe.
Social life of Foursquare users mapped
10:07 am
FlowingData brings us the news on Anil Bawa-Cavia’s Achipelago project that attempts to organize 845,000 FourSquare checkins into visible patterns across a few major cities.
In these maps, activity on the Foursquare network is aggregated onto a grid of ‘walkable’ cells (each one 400×400 meters in size) represented by dots. The size of each dot corresponds to the level of activity in that cell. By this process we can see social centers emerge in each city.
There is an obvious bias in the data, since it’s solely linked to users of FourSquare, but it’s interesting to see how ‘even’ Paris is compared to New York City.
VizWorld.com 
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