Top Twitter Friends is a web service that creates a visual map for any Twitter account of the other accounts it is most frequently used to converse with. The site uses the Mailana social network analysis system to analyze Twitter conversations and come up with the data for the visualization.

Marshall Kirkpatrick recently used the Top Twitter Friends web application to generate an analysis of a series of popular twitterers, complete with lists of each Twitterer's most frequently contacted friends, and a screenshot of their visualization. Marshall's perspective is that the openness of this information gives us some pretty intimate insight into the inner circle of influential people in our social networks, and those of notable people.

Not only can you see who people most frequently converse with, but clicking the info link beside a person's account name reveals a tag cloud of the most commonly used words in the conversations between the two Twitter accounts in question, plus an additional link to actually go and read the conversations between them.

I find it strange that while I'm perfectly happy having public conversations with people over Twitter, it makes me feel slightly uncomfortable that those conversations can so easily be searched out and read by anyone that wants to do so. The conversations were public, after all, so it shouldn't feel strange, but somehow it does.

What's your perspective? Does it make you uncomfortable that there are powerful tools for analyzing your social network and the content of your conversations? Let us know in the comments.

What's this "reflow" stuff mentioned in the title? We're glad you asked because you should probably fully understand know what we're referring to before you watch the vid. Reflow deals with the process by which a browser lays stuff out on a web page -- well, that's a simple way of putting it.

Anyway, the video above is the reflow process of Wikipedia slowed and "visualized". We're unsure how the author of the video captured or simulated the action, but what we do know is it's an interesting way to spend a few seconds. Check out a Google Japan reflow after the jump.

[via DougT]

There are plenty of attractive visualizations for Flickr images. But Tag Galaxy is certainly the spaciest. Enter a keyword and Tag Galaxy will search Flickr for related images. You can either click the big ball of gas at the center of your screen to see some of the images, or you can check out one of the little related-tag planets orbiting the center of your tag galaxy (or solar system, really).

The picture doesn't really do Tag Galaxy justice. Each planet is in motion, and you can navigate by dragging and dropping various parts of the screen. When you actually click on a tag to view the images, you can spin the ball around to find more images, and click an image to enlarge it.

Be forewarned, Tag Galaxy can make your web browser go Supernova if you're not careful. Firefox froze up on us a couple of times while we were playing with the web page. We also had a bunch of other tabs open, but Tag Galaxy certainly seemed to take a toll on our CPU and RAM usage.

thanks Sascha!

For a while, YouTube was just, well, YouTube. Now under Google's wing, the popular video sharing site receives the random, occasional upgrade. Here's a new one: You can now browse videos related to the one you're watching through an interactive web-like interface.

In order to access the feature, first full-screen your chosen video. At the bottom left corner, next to the play/pause button, you should find the the new button. Click on it, and YouTube will take you on a cool, new related-video ride.

In testing the feature, we discovered that not all videos had the button. Further investigation led to the culprit: Videos that YouTube considers promoted content (YouTube is likely paid to promote these videos) don't have it. If for some reason a video or two doesn't have the button, fear not. Google has a habit of releasing gradual updates to its properties, so it shouldn't be too long until it becomes a site-wide feature for all videos.

Ever wondered what a real visualization of network data moving hither and yon would look like? You know, one of those things from the movies where it all looks really exciting and, instead of flat graphs and line after line of ping replies, the data springs to life in a 3d environment where each remote and local host is displayed on a vast virtual field? Wonder no more. The brilliant hackers at Ninja Strike Force have released Eve, a tool which does precisely that -- and it's beautiful to watch.

Check out this 20 second video of what Eve looks like when you fire up Bittorrent on a quiet network.
Each remote host is displayed as a box out in virtual space -- you're able to adjust the perspective of the 3d view -- and you can finally watch all those packets bouncing back and forth. It may seem like just a pretty toy, but it has real practical uses that Ninja Strike Force hopes are worth a few bucks to proactive network monitoring teams.

Eve produces real-time visualizations of network traffic. Because human pattern matching far surpasses any man-made attempt at intuition, the idea behind Eve is that an administrator who becomes accustomed to the way her network 'looks' under normal activity would quickly spot trouble when it happens or would notice unusual flow patterns and be able to react quickly, and with valuable and understandable data at hand.

Eve will set you back about $34 bucks US, which is a tiny price for such an awesome tool. A crippled trial version shows you real data, but randomizes what you see when you look for detail on a remote host; Pretty, but useless.. kinda like Jessica Simpson.

Thanks Elliot!

This time waster isn't a game... it's more like a web toy. Neave Audio / Visual is a web-based audio visualizer, using Flash to access either your microphone or wave-in port.

The visualizations are simple, but effective. They're not going to win any awards for being super flashy, but unlike many other audio visualizations, these ones very obviously react to sound. It's particularly enjoyable to get some young children in front of the computer screen, and turn on a microphone. Once they start to see how the sounds they make are interpreted on-screen, you'll start hearing all sorts of interesting stuff. Keep some ear plugs handy, if you're going to follow this advice.

You know how in cheesy science fiction movies they always have crazy graphical representations for data. Like if the lead character is hacking into a database, he's never writing text on a screen. Instead, he navigates an avatar through a 3D landscape that looks uncannily like the building he's sitting in.

Well, it turns out that when you do represent data visually, it can look pretty cool.



NetQoS has developed a program called Netcosm that monitors network traffic and turns it into pretty pictures like the one you see above. Each icon represents data flowing between hosts. It's size, shape, speed, and color are all determined by the type of data included in the packet.

Right now, Netcosm is just a demonstration. There are no plans for a public release.

[via TechCrunch]

Michael Battle has created a 3D Flash visualization of Digg stories in a full-screen spectacle that is pretty cool. Digg has their own Flash visualization tools, but nothing like this. If you haven't seen this in action, it is rockin'. I still prefer to search through Digg stories the old-fashioned website way, but 3D digg is certainly a break from the ordinary everyday once in a while. I have an interest in alternative user interfaces, and this is a good example of one that pushes at least the Digg envelope. Admittedly, this kind of thing is a bit more Web 3.0 than 2.0, but cool nonetheless.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington has the scoop on a couple fancy new visualization tools that will be launching next Monday on Digg. Both are Flash-based visualizations that let you keep tabs on Digg stories in an eye-pleasing way. The first, Digg Stack, shows recent stories as vertical bars and diggs as blocks that fall on top of them, building up each story's "stack." You can click on a stack to see just that story, where a recent activity graph is shown. Digg Swarm shows stories as a sort of galaxy of circles, bigger circles indicating more popular stories, and users as yellow satellites that appear next to stories as they are dugg. These both look pretty cool (and would make neat screen savers), but I don't foresee them being especially useful beyond simple novelty. In related news, Arrington says Digg will be launching a new Sports section in August, to complement the Science, World & Business, Videos, Entertainment, and Gaming sections it added earlier this month.

Swarm the dot com advertises itself as "a new way to browse the web and find the most interesting sites." Basically what it is is a Firefox extension that watches what sites you're browsing and sends them back to the Swarm server, which then displays them (along with everyone else's) in a cool Flash visual. From the Flash interface you can see what sites people are visiting in real-time, visit them, and chat with other users about them. The coolest feature of the visualization is that it shows links as red lines, i.e when a user goes from site A to site B, a line appears (briefly) between the two sites. Is this really useful? I'm not sure-at the moment I'm being treated to a fiew of the porn sites one person is visiting (even though the data-collecting extension can be turned on and off easily), but I dig the concept and it's fun to watch.