Twitter activity visualization

February 16, 2010 5:43 AM

TweetCatcha visualizes the tweets resulting from the latest news articles that appeared during the last 24 hours on the New York Times website. Pretty amazing for student work. See TweetCatcha in action (warning: it takes a bit of time to load). While it's loading, here is the creator's blog post describing it.
posted by like_neon (10 comments total)

Wow, I know these people and was in the class where this was prototyped last semester! Great job Bruce and Nick!
posted by Brainy at 6:10 AM on February 16, 2010

Yet another flash interface that places pretty above functional? The "List View" tab seems to be a sop to browsing, but it's very much an after-thought.

Does show just how uninteresting Twitter commentary is, though.
posted by Leon at 6:20 AM on February 16, 2010

Note that for some reason the "in action" link brings up a "live" view of November 18 tweets and stories. You need to use the Change Date tab to bring up a more recent timeframe.
posted by beagle at 6:32 AM on February 16, 2010

TweetCaptcha:

Please type the words exactly as they appear in the box.

+------------------------------------+
| A^m r_eal^ly dⁱg_ggi^{ng t}h_e n_ew S^poon _al^bu_m. Y^e_ah! |
+------------------------------------+

_
posted by koeselitz at 6:56 AM on February 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

But why are all the sperm swimming away from the egg?
posted by kitarra at 7:04 AM on February 16, 2010

boring.
posted by monkeyJuice at 8:40 AM on February 16, 2010

Very shiny.
posted by benzenedream at 8:57 AM on February 16, 2010

Pretty...could make a really good aggregate data interface for all sorts of stuff if it was real time. Financial or marketing stuff, maybe, for in ponzi scheme con artists, Wall street investors.


Anyhow, Tufte disciples everywhere will have geek-gasms.
posted by Skygazer at 10:17 AM on February 16, 2010

Ooh, shiny.

But it’s slow to the point of being unusable. And it doesn't have a particularly interesting set of data — it seems NYT articles don’t really generate tweets beyond “here’s a new article”.
posted by spitefulcrow at 10:57 AM on February 16, 2010

I think that this is a very nice piece of work, and a nice visualization (at least aesthetically). But the content it displays and allows the user to analyze is underwhelming. People tweet about the NYT, a little, and a few hours after the article is published. That's not news. And it's not possible to see the trends comparing which articles (or article categories, such as say, International versus NY Metro vs Sports) are more quickly tweeted. Or that might be tweeted more frequently.

Still, way to go visualizations!
posted by zpousman at 2:26 PM on February 16, 2010 [1 favorite]