Visualization of Egyptian Revolution On Twitter

An anonymous reader writes "A visualization of the network of retweets with the hashtag #jan25 at February 11 2011, at the time of the announcement of Mubarak's resignation, is available. The data was collected using Gephi connected to the Twitter Streaming API, converting the users and retweets to nodes and edges in a dynamic network. Though the data represents only approximately 10% of the retweets, it's interesting to see the large flow of interconnected retweets in just one hour." I've attached the video if you want to watch it.

Re: Interesting?

[Kvasio]

Stop whining. Now you have to pay your dues for the 4-year live feed of "internationally significant" OJ Simpson trial. (Outside USA he was relevant only as an actor in The Naked Gun trilogy, still not justifying complete lack of any other programming on CNN 'International')

What does it mean?

[PPH]

In order to convey useful information, the following would have been helpful:

• A legend or other explanation of what the dots and links represent.
• A running clock. Better yet, an animated timeline with critical events marked.
• Some indication of the age of a 'link' (tweet?). I have no way of knowing whether a pair of dots linked together represents a single message and the individuals subsequently ceased communications or persistent messaging over a period of time.

That said, this may seem to be pretty pointless to the average Slashdotter. But I'm betting that sociologists and intelligence services are looking at ways to glean information from just such information graphs. Identify the retweet source nodes geographically and we could see if this was an organized 'astroturfing' or maybe send the secret police to those locations.

Re: Interesting?

[Morty]

Am I the only one out there that is getting a bit bored with the 24/7 coverage of this?

I mean...sure it is important...mostly to people on that side of the world, but man..enough is enough. Gotta be something new that's newsworthy...

Egypt is a regional power, and a significant US ally. It's literally undergoing a democratic revolution. The revolution has been mostly peaceful. The revolution has significant implications to long-term US interests. And the revolution has been extremely rapid.

There are plenty of other things going on. But for once, I'm with the news people: this is huge, this is newsworthy, and this is worth following.

Re:how useless twitter is

[milkmage]

sharing news of a democratic revolution is SPAM?

complaining because there's seeds in your orange juice is SPAM.

Twitter, just like the rest of the ENTIRE INTERNET, is only as good as you make it.