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Twitter has made another move towards monetizing their service through acquisition of a small startup called “Lucky Sort”, creators of a technology called TopicWatch.
In effect, Lucky Sort was a big data play – it used NLP (natural language processing) techniques to discover information from huge, unstructured data sets. What made it unique was its ability to derive structure without having to first define a database of nouns, verbs, etc. as traditionally would be the case with NLP. Instead, Lucky Sort was moved towards data mining through statistics rather than input ontologies.
Three of the key engineers behind TopicWatch are now joining twitter’s “Revenue Engineering Department”, which sounds like a very cryptic name that’s sure to conjure images of suits, ties, and greasy salesmen. LuckySort has already proven to be fascinating in their integrations with StockTwits and a few other tools that could distill the massive twitter firehose into interesting interactive visualizations and data-mining tools. So watch yourself on twitter, you never know what might come up next.
via Twitter Acquires Big Data Visualization Startup Lucky Sort, Service To Shutter In Months Ahead | TechCrunch.
Science bigdata, twitter
Robert Kosara (eagereyes) has written a fun little tool that posts random text from InfoVis papers at major conferences on twitter at the @InfoVis_Ebooks account.
Each tweet contains a reference to the paper the snippet is from. For InfoVis, VAST, and CHI, these are DOIs rather than links. Links get long and distracting, whereas DOIs are much easier to tune out in a tweet. If you want to see the paper, google the DOI string (keep the “doi:” part). You can also take everything but the “doi:” and append it to http://dx.doi.org/ to be redirected to the paper page. For other sources, I will probably have to use links.
It’s more humor than function, at first glance, but you never know when you might find one worthy of digging deeper. For example, the image above pointed me to an interesting paper on visualizing Ice Hockey Analytics, all because I wondered what “SnapShot” was.
via Meet @InfoVis_Ebooks, Your Source for Random InfoVis Paper Snippets | eagereyes.
Science eagereyes, infovis, twitter
Visualizing.org has a neat twitter visualization online of 1645 twitter accounts related to information visualization. Taking a short list of seed accounts and then finding all their followers and friends, the result is an impressive (if not a bit crowded) graph visualization. Some edge bundling would have been nice, but you can get a rough idea of the connectivity just from the sheer number of connections.
I’m proud to see @VizWorld on the map as a rather prominent bubble near the upper-right area.
Visualizing.org Player | visualizing.org.
Science graph, twitter, visualization
Some MySpace engineers have defected and taken their social network expertise to create a new web application called ‘Gravity‘ which attempts to determine your interests from your FaceBook and Twitter streams, and then help you connect with other like-minded individuals.
The company’s ultimate aim is twofold. For users, they can see who, in any given network, actually shares their interests. “For example, if a user tweets about an Interpol concert, the band would show up in their visualization, allowing them to connect to others that share that interest,” says Anand. (Just imagine the possibilities for a dating site.)
In particular, I like their graph visualizations that they call ‘Gravity Interest Graph’. The real factor behind their success or failure, tho, probably lies in the accuracy of their predictions on Interests.
via Infographic of the Day: Gravity App Scours Twitter and Facebook to Predict Your Interests | Co.Design.
Science facebook, gravity, twitter
Twitter has finally analyzed the massive amount of twitter traffic collected during the 2010 World Cup, analyzing the various hashtags they created for individual teams and games. Their result: the above infographic cataloging how the traffic broke down during this record-shattering event.
To highlight how much Twitter has been pulsing with World Cup activity over the past month, our analytics and relevance teams put together the infographic above, charting fans’ use of hashflags (like #esp or #usa) during the tournament with a background of TPS over the same period.
* When you look at this graphic, think of it like a soundwave — the louder and more consistent the “sound,” the bigger the impact in all directions.
* Countries’ flags represent use of their hashflag. The size of the flag “waves” fluctuate with the frequency & consistency of tweets containing each country’s hashflag.
via Twitter Blog: The 2010 World Cup: a Global Conversation.
Science sports, twitter
MTV has followed up the success of their previous collaboration with Stamen Design and the VMA Tweet Tracker with a visualization of the MTV Movie Awards tweets. This one is a bit different, with far more animation.
This is how it works. Once you open the site, there is an opaque overlay with simple instructions: the visual graph contains pictures of the most popular topics/people that moment (calculated in 60 second increments), as a topic becomes more popular the image will grow, with the most popular topic holding court in the center of the graph, if you click on an image you can access all the related tweets. Not surprisingly, when I logged on this morning, it looked like a partial promo for the Twilight series, with Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart’s enlarged faces eerily presiding over the frenetic scene.
It’s still online, so you can go check it out here.
via Attack Of The Tweets: MTV’s Movie Awards Twitter Visualization Graph.
Science mtv, twitter
While I disagree with the title “World’s First Twitter Artwork”, the concept is clever. They’ve constructed a virtual picture frame where Twitter users can elect to tweet a special message, and have a portion of the canvas covered with their avatar and a link to their Twitter Profile page. More followers makes your avatar larger, with the canvas size representing the number of followers of Aston Kutcher.
Join the worlds first artwork made by Twitter users! The artwork will later be made into a physical piece by Swedish artist Jon Holm. Tweet and get your profile pic inside the frame. More followers = bigger size.
VizWorld is in there somewhere.. Not sure where yet.
via Dont Tell Ashton – The worlds first Twitter artwork.
Science art, social media, twitter
Are you a true Twitter user? Do you have at least 10 followers? Do you follow at least 10 people? Have you tweeted at least 10 times? Then you are a true Twitter user. However, only 21% of the people using Twitter are true Twitter users, so that makes you an elite person. Doesn’t it?
Take a look at the infographic to the right to see other facts about Twitter. My favorite? The graph that shows 49% of all twitter accounts were created between November 2008 and April 2009.
Read more…
Graphics infographic, social media, twitter
VizWorld.com 
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