About 4 years ago, I wrote about Visualising Twitter Conversations in 2D Space. Based on an idea by Lucy Pepper, I built a quick hack to show what Twitter threads actually looked like.

Well, lockdown finally got the best of me, and I finished the project!

TweeView.ml

Here are a few screenshots of "interesting" trees, and a little bit about how it works.

In this example, the user has a main thread that they are posting on: You can see that a few people reply to some of the earlier tweets in the thread.

In this example, the original user only posts once - but some other users have a pleasant chat in the thread. A common pattern is that there are lots of first-level replies - but very little discourse. That's not always the case - here's the Telegraph posting a story to Twitter.

While most people are happy to just comment, a few people have sustained conversations. It can get a little fanatic - I've rotated this sideways to make it slightly easier to view: Two people with very different political opinions have a civilised and productive discussion...

In this rare case, a 2nd- and 3rd-level comment attracts more attention than the initial Tweet.

And, just for fun(!) here's a ridiculously long thread:

Political Animal

@politic_animal

Things no-one else is crazy enough to be doing right now: final prep for a trip to answer one of the great unanswered questions: just how far can you travel by bus from London in 24hrs? I *think* I know on paper, but in practice…? Follow along from 3am as I slowly go mad. #bus24 pic.x.com/ga8hzywgp6

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What does it look like?

To have a play, visit TweeView.ml and paste in a recent Twitter thread.

You can also look at these three pre-rendered demos:

• Small thread
• Complex thread
• Huge thread

Notes

• This is a demo.
• It is read-only. You can't send messages and it won't ask you to log in.
• Limitations in the Twitter API means it only works on Tweets in the last 7 days.
• This doesn't cope with threads "orphaned" after a parent Tweet has been deleted.
• The code is open source, and built on lots of open source components, GitHub.com/edent/TweeView.

Enjoy!

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:

• Small 3D
• Complex 3D
• Ridiculous 3D
• Complex 4D
• Ridiculous 4D

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!

Zachary Powell 🥑

@devwithzachary

A wild @gerardsans and @edent (winner of best t-shirt for sure) pic.x.com/Oc3KTPswvZ

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Zachary Powell 🥑

@devwithzachary

Thank 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

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