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Hewitt

Tag: tryit

  • Try it: 3 ways to use your Twitter archive

    Try it: 3 ways to use your Twitter archive

    Twitter users age over timeIn the past 7.5 years Twitter has gone from novelty to newsmaker. Today, Twitter boasts 200M monthly users and over 170B tweets sent with particularly strong growth in the coveted 18-29 demographic.

    If you’re a Twitter user and curious to delve into your past (even though you may regret some of what you’ve shared), Twitter allows users to download all past tweets. To access your own Twitter archive, go to the gear icon top right, click on settings, and scroll to the bottom of the page. A link will be emailed to you where you can download the zip file, but note that Twitter prevents you from downloading too frequently.

    [tweetable hashtags=”#twitter”]Three things to try with your Twitter archive [/tweetable]:

    1. Twitter archiveView tweet volume and navigate by month. For me, tweet frequency corresponds with conference attendance and making new connections. My archive shows the year I skipped SXSW with a far lower tweet volume in March. Click through tweets by month to see what’s going on in your high or low volume outliers.
    2. Search for the terms you mention in your bio. Unless you’re wonderfully creative, your Twitter bio is probably the best indicator to followers of what you tweet about. My bio references social and mobile technology and Arsenal Football Club. A search of my Twitter archive shows 659 references of social, 361 mentions of mobile, yet only 65 mentions of Arsenal, showing that there’s room to grow as a fan!
    3. Play with the data in the csv. In addition to the clean interface you get when clicking on index.html in the zip file, Twitter provides both JSON and csv files. A non-technical user can download the csv and sort the data in a variety of ways. One way to visualize the topics you tweet about is to download the csv, pull the text of all your tweets, and then plug them into Wordle, as I have below:

    twitter text

  • Try it: News visualized with Topicly

    Try it: News visualized with Topicly

    As Flipboard collects another $50M on a $800M valuation, traditional news publishers are experimenting with more visual displays of the news. The Washington Post’s Topicly is largely algorithm-driven, full-bleed display of news stories by volume. Editors plan to incorporate more social media from the web as well as from the Post’s own journalists.

    topicly

    A few observations:

    • This is a good example of desktop user interface informed by mobile — see how the three horizontal line icon is rapidly becoming a standard meaning “expand this” on the desktop web.
    • More context and functionality in the interface (what do those numbers in the expanded menu mean?) might be helpful to understand what you’re seeing. Is it sheer volume or is there a measure of resonance? Is there any editorial hand?
    • Sites like this are tough beasts to feed with visual content: see how some of the images are pixellated when you click through.
    • This is a revenue experiment, as well as a visual one. There is a site-level sponsorship at top left in addition to interspersed native advertising. Sites looking for sustainable models will continue to experiment with sponsorship of specific features and functionality, like Citi sponsoring the launch of Quartz’s annotations.
  • Try it: Google define

    Try it: Google define

    Language is always changing, but the arrival of consumer technology over the past 25 years has meant a sharp uptick in our new day-to-day jargon. Terms like modem, pager, or smartphone enter and exit the common usage with remarkable frequency.

    FlowingData this week pointed out how Google’s “define: <word>” feature now displays word etymology via flowchart and graphs word usage over time. Three words graphed over time tell a story of technology adoption and attrition:

    telegram word usage over time

    You can clearly see where telegraphy emerged in the mid 1800s, and how the flat line begins around the time the last telegram is sent in 2006. Telegram remains in the language as a common noun and as a relatively popular name for newspapers, but the arc aligns with the technology in use.

    Next, let’s track fax technology, which clings on doggedly in the finance, law, and healthcare sectors. A sharp rise in the 1990s, but not the subsequent flatline many might assume.

    fax word usage over time Finally, have a look at tweet:

    tweet word usage over time

    The word tweet meaning “the chirp of a small or young bird” has been around since at least 1800. You see a minor spike in the 1920s, when Jazz Age musicians produce and record “When my sugar comes down the street, all the little birdies go tweet tweet tweet.” But the real hockey stick spike starts in 2006 when Twitter enters the scene.

    As a language geek I love how we can track and quantify language usage in more simple, visual ways. Analyses like souped-up concordances can not only track macro usage trends, but perhaps even diagnose dementia in individual authors. As   visualization tools become more common and accessible, we’ll have more ways to analyze and add context to our understanding of the language we use.

  • Try it: Visualize your gmail network

    immersion graph of gmailUse gmail? You might want to try MIT Media Lab’s immersion, a terrific service that maps your email correspondence through metadata and provides you with a clear view of your email networks and correspondence habits over time. The colored clusters above reveal my own family, friend, and colleague configurations over 8.5 years of gmail use. You can segment by time period, which lets you juxtapose your shifting networks with personal or professional events like a wedding or a job change. Sliders allow you to increase or reduce the number of nodes or links among them viewed. You can choose to view or hide the node display names — I’ve chosen to hide them here to protect the innocent.

    node network chartA drill down feature allows you to see your network from the perspective of a single node. In this case I have singled out Melyssa Plunkett-Gomez (the orange dot in the middle), a former colleague from Crimson Hexagon and now a friend. The lines radiate out from Melyssa to individuals in colored network clusters, which are identified by the frequency of correspondence among the group. The width of the line indicates frequency of the messages.

    Sidebar content quantifies our mutual correspondence statscorrespondence back and forth over the years, and it’s easy to see the volume peak during our time as colleagues. A section not shown here shows who introduced us to each other  (no one — that transaction occurred in Facebook, not gmail), and lists the people Melyssa has introduced me to over the years.

    This post skims the surface of a complex and illuminating tool. The death of email continues to be predicted, but it seems inevitable that the way we manage it have to get better. Analyzing the metadata to reveal and understand the networks and patterns in our correspondence is an intriguing first step.

  • Try it: Make the movie of your personal data

    We’re all posting, tweeting, and sharing more than ever. How might all this micro-content we publish on the social web be boiled up into a story? I came across two interesting services that make a movie from your shared content: Vizify for Twitter, and Foursquare time machine.

    First, Vizify for Twitter lets you create what they’re calling an animated portrait of your Twitter activity — kind of a greatest hits reel for your account. Here’s mine and here’s where to make your own. You authenticate through Twitter, then Vizify finds the  tweets that have resonated the most, and creates an animation with audio. There’s a degree of customization — within the categories of photo, text, and video you can switch up the selection or delete an item. There are different soundtracks you can choose from based on a semi-cryptic set of icons.

    foursquare visualizedNext, Foursquare time machine (co-branded with Samsung Galaxy 4) offers a slick fast-motion visualization of all your checkins. Rather than a highlights reel approach, this app tells you the full story. I had some trouble getting the stats to render, which might be a good thing as the restaurant:gym ratio over the past four years seemed problematic. Some of the motion is fun — your travel across geographic distances is rendered via plane or occasionally flying saucer. This application is positioned as a set up for The Next Big Thing, which is improved predictions of where you would like to go next. Foursquare has amassed a significant urban data layer without a clear revenue growth model — useful predictions might be one path to monetize that data.

    There are many important concerns about, as The New Yorker puts it, the way we are all pole dancing on the internet. And as the Guardian pointed out last week, even just your online metadata tell a revealing story. Nonetheless it’s fascinating to see the kinds of movie-scrapbooks we can create today with the content we’ve explicitly produced and have opted in to share.

  • Try it: 3 ways to tell a story online

    Compelling content is a differentiator in a world where everyone is an online publisher. That content can take entirely new forms: data visualization (like this recurring developments site from Beutler Ink) or inspired curation (like Brainpickings by Maria Popova). And of course multimedia plays an ever larger role in online storytelling. Last year’s groundbreaking New York Times feature on the avalanche at Tunnel Creek has even turned snow fall into a verb.

    New apps and platforms are springing up to entice a wider range of people to try multimedia and interactive storytelling. Three to consider:

    1. Storyteller
    Last week Amazon released Storyteller, a quickly and easy way for writers to storyboard their scripts. The scripts have to be in Studios but the service, still in beta, is free (except for a 45-day option). This feels like a grown-up version of xtranormal, and a way for writers to more quickly envision the creative potential of a script. Best of all, you can use the tool to storyboard others’ scripts in a more public and collaborative environment.

    2. Tapestry
    When not ruining our lives with Dots, the people over at betaworks have been polishing version 2.0 of Tapestry. Tapestry is a mobile app aimed at beautiful, short-form storytelling. I gave it a try — the admin user experience is clean and simple on the admin side, and the consumer experience of tap to-advance on mobile is oddly addictive kind of like, well, Dots.

    puppy story

    3. Zeega
    Finally, more interesting developments in interactive storytelling over at Zeega. Originally a collaboration at Harvard, Zeega is now among the first cohort of media entrepreneurs over at Matter VC. The platform enables slick integration of audio and video, and has attracted a creative community masterful with found assets. There’s enough complexity to be able to create pieces for a recent exhibit at SFMOMA — but it’s also a way to have a lot of fun with your ABCs and the Jackson 5.

    The most encouraging thing about all these apps is the way they are lowering the technical bar for creative storytelling online. It recalls how blogging liberated text publishing from the webmasters and multimillion dollar content management systems in the early 2000s. These are three to watch — and to try.

     

  • Try it: Graph your Facebook friends

    Last week, Stephen Wolfram released a long and interesting analysis of aggregated and anonymized Facebook user data from his Data Donor program. He offers some observations about how Facebook behaviors illustrate the trajectories of people’s lives — how many people they friend, where they settle, and how clusters of friends reflect communities (school, friend, neighborhood).

    In September I tried Wolfram Alpha to examine my Facebook use, and not much about the broad strokes observations changed when I re-ran it recently. I still use words more than pictures, and have roughly the same number of male and female friends. Geography is still fairly widely dispersed. This time, I took a closer look at the network graph.

    social_network_2013

    The colors indicate a typology defined in the web app. In brief:

    • Social insiders (purple) share the most connections with you. These include many colleagues in interactive, and my son.
    • Social outsiders (grey) share at most one friend with you. These include people I’ve worked with briefly during consulting gigs, or met traveling somewhere far away on vacation. I see far more of these than I would have predicted.
    • Social connectors (green) connect groups otherwise disconnected. In my network, this includes a friend who I went to elementary school with who also worked with me at the same software company in our twenties.
    • Social neighbors (orange) have few friends you don’t already know. In my graph, this includes late adopters of social networks, and skews older.
    • Social gateways (red) have a great many friends who you don’t know. If I were being more strategic about growing my social network, this is where I would focus, thinking that the strength of weak ties would provide more opportunities for connection that could be helpful for everything from a great restaurant in Montreal to job candidate referral.

    You can graph your own life and social network courtesy of Stephen Wolfram right here.