Visualising Twitter Conversations in 3D Space
By @edent
· data tweeview twitter · 6 comments · 450 words · read ~1,620 times.
Here's set of visualisation I've been working on. Last night, at #TapIntoTwitter, I demonstrated a fun way to view your Twitter conversations as a force-directed graph in 3D space. I'm going to show it off to you, then explain how it works. This is a designed as a "fun" demo. Here we go!
So, what's going on? As I've previously blogged about, Twitter has a new conversations API. That allows you to get Tweet replies in a tree-like structure.
A small conversation looks something like this:
You can see that the initial tweet gets a lot of attention - many first level replies. Then, some of those tweets spawn other, longer threads.
People occasionally delete their tweets. This means some branches of the conversation are orphaned. Which gives us this wonderful set of constellations.
In this example, the more retweets a tweet has - the larger its radius.
In this example, there are a chain of Tweets. While the first Tweet in the chain has the most replies and retweets - the rest of the thread is also heavily trafficked. 
Those Tweets on the right get plenty of love!
Finally, here's a thread of over 200 tweets from a popular account:
The first couple of tweets attract a lot of attention, and some parts of the conversation branch off into their own little trees.
You can play with these visualisations:
A few points to note:
- This is a demo. It may break entirely or perform badly.
- The code is open source, and built on lots of open source components, GitHub.com/edent/TweeView.
- The Twitter conversation API only works on tweets sent in the last 7 days. So you can't use this on older threads.
- Large conversations take a long time to load and can be slow to render.
Enjoy!
Replying to @devwithzacharyA wild @gerardsans and @edent (winner of best t-shirt for sure) pic.x.com/oc3ktpswvz
Replying to @devwithzacharyThank you very much @edent was great looking at how we could visualise tweets in more than 1D (4D twitter anyone?) #TapIntoTwitter pic.x.com/momuqle3t0
Nice stuff ... related to renderings I've been making of "conversations" by using DOT and laying things out as charts. Not dynamic, and much less pretty, but for some conversations, very much superior for actually reading the tweets.
A recent example:
solipsys.co.uk/Chartter/14295…
This is hard! Navigating large discussions is really hard. I've also written an experimental platform where discussions are shown natively as digraphs... it's highlighted some of the limitations and opportunities of these alternate renderings.
Here:
solipsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/DiscDA…
Visualising Twitter Conversations in 3D Space L: shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/09/v… C: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=283784…
Twitter conversations in 3D space.
Beautiful
shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/09/v…
That’s beautiful!
@Edent oh nice! I like the effects on that one, looks very sci-fi. I think there is a lot of room for useful tools in this space, and I'm excited to see what the future holds.