Visualising Twitter Conversations in 2D Space

Update! The source-code for this app can be found at https://github.com/edent/TweeView

Many years ago, I created a threaded conversation viewer for fledgling social network App.net. It was a unique way to flow through a conversation without having to be constrained by the linear vertical scroll of the typical web browser.

App.net died - and I never found a reasonable way to recreate it for Twitter. Until today.

Paul Butler has created "Treeverse" a Chrome Extension which lets you visualise Twitter conversations in a tree view.

This is what Twitter threads actually look like. They're not linear conversations, they're branching organic trees.

They're even more beautiful when you decouple them from content. This is the same conversation but viewed differently.

That's a d3 representation of the data created by the twarc utilities.

Some threads become so long and involved that the original user might not even see how they conclude. This is what "off topic" looks like!

Some arc off into a mess - but that's OK! You should be able to prune off the branches which don't matter to you.

Some threads are small, but perfectly formed. Is this easier to read than Twitter's vertical list? I don't know - but it is more useful for seeing how a discussion evolves.

But you'll never be able to take advantage of all the beauty you create. Twitter selfishly keeps its "conversation/show.json" API private.

Most Twitter conversation viewers use the only resource available to them - the search API.

Take a Tweet then search for @ messages to the author, and then filter the ones you need. Of course, the search function only goes back 7 days, so you can't see older conversations.

Want to go more than one level deep? Ha! Good luck. Your recursive calls will quickly hit the API limits.

A proper conversation API has been one of the most requested features of Twitter.

It exists.

But only for official Twitter Apps.

Plenty of people have documented Twitter's private APIs. In order to call conversation/show.json, you'll need to use the official API keys. This is left as an exercise to the reader.

Once done, I've written a short Python script which grabs the first 100 tweets in a conversation, and then spits out a twarc file.

This can then be imported into Treeverse:

Or processed in twarc:

Or anything else your imagination desires.

Enjoy!

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Carry on the conversation on Twitter.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

THREAD!

This is what Twitter threads *actually* look like. They're not linear conversations, they're branching organic trees. pic.x.com/gr4b0cCV4v

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