Visualization Tools for Twitter A review and analysis of visualization tools in the Twitter domain By Joseph Vincze

Twitter Overview Twitter is a micro-blogging social network whereby its users send and receive short 140-character messages called "tweets". People use Twitter for sharing all manner of information – their thoughts, ideas, opinions, and sentiment; anything that is affecting them at that moment. Since Twitter’s public launch in July 2006 programmers and social scientists have been searching for ways to gather and analyze its data. Much of that data is public and available for mining and analysis. According to Pear Analytics (2009) tweets fell into the following six categories: –Pointless babble– 40% –Conversational – 38% –Pass-along value – 9% –Self-promotion – 6% –Spam – 4% –News – 4%

The four pillars of Twitter Influence on Twitter Connectedness in the Twittersphere Twitter sentiment Currently “trending” on Twitter 21 tools were analyzed in regards to their effectiveness in visualizing these four categories.

Influence on Twitter Influence can be estimated by the quantity and quality of one’s Twitter followers. Also, whether you followers are re-tweeting your posts – an indication of the level of trust they place in you. In order to engage with your followers more, you need to know the trends they are following and their preferences. In addition, information about what time to tweet and what might be of interest to your followers is important.

Influence on Twitter

Connectedness in the Twittersphere How far does your influence extend? See yourself as a node on a social network diagram. See how many nodes away you are from a famous celebrity or a potential business contact.

Connectedness in the Twittersphere

Twitter Sentiment People share their feelings on Twitter, both positive and negative about events in their lives. That emotion might be textual and/or represented in an emoticon.

Twitter Sentiment

Sentiment. Each tweet is shown as a circle positioned by sentiment, an estimate of the emotion contained in the tweet's text. Unpleasant tweets are drawn as blue circles on the left, and pleasant tweets as green circles on the right. Sedate tweets are drawn as darker circles on the bottom, and active tweets as brighter circles on the top. Hover your mouse over a tweet or click on it to see its text.

Twitter Sentiment Topics. Tweets about a common topic are grouped into topic clusters. Keywords above a cluster indicate its topic. Tweets that do not belong to a topic are visualized as singletons on the right. Hover your mouse over a tweet or click on it to see its text.

Twitter Sentiment Heatmap. Pleasure and arousal are used to divide sentiment into a 8×8 grid. The number of tweets that lie within each grid cell are counted and used to color the cell: red for more tweets than average, and blue for fewer tweets than average. White cells contain no tweets. Hover your mouse over a cell to see its tweet count.

Twitter Sentiment Tag Cloud. Common words from the emotional regions Upset, Happy, Relaxed, and Unhappy are shown. Words that are more frequent are larger. Hover the mouse over a word to see how often it occurred.

Twitter Sentiment Timeline. Tweets are drawn in a bar chart to show the number of tweets posted at different times. Pleasant tweets are shown in green on the top of the chart, and unpleasant tweets are shown in blue on the bottom. Hover the mouse over a bar to see how many tweets were posted at the given time.

Twitter Sentiment Map. Tweets are drawn on a map of the world at the location where they were posted. Please note most Twitter users do not provide their location, so only a few tweets will be shown on the map. Hover your mouse over a tweet or click on it to see its text.

Twitter Sentiment Affinity. Frequent tweets, people, hashtags, and URLs are drawn in a graph to show important actors in the tweet set, and any relationship or affinity they have to one another. Hover your mouse over a node, or click on a node to see its tweets.

Twitter Sentiment Tweets. Tweets are listed to show their date, author, pleasure, arousal, and text. You can click on a column's header to sort by that column.

Currently “trending” on Twitter A “trending topic” is a word, phrase or topic that is tagged at a greater rate than other tags via Twitter (Twitter, 2014). Trending topics are often spurned by an event that prompts people to talk about it.

Currently “trending” on Twitter

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