Visualizing the Firefox Community on Twitter
Twitter is an important source of information for millions of people, and it has also become one of the top communication channels that we use at Mozilla to engage with our community. The Firefox Twitter account is growing faster than ever before, and a search on the #firefox hashtag alone will summon a lively stream of tweets from around the globe. But that’s only a thin slice of all the action taking place. To really appreciate the scale and scope of Firefox activity within the Twitter universe, you need to analyze the data through an entirely different lens.
To achieve this, I’m working on creating a Twitter visualization that captures the unique and multi-dimentional nature of our community, their conversations, and the energy that flows through their tweets. As you know, there are some incredibly complex and mesmerizing data visualizations out there… my goal is to create a similarly stunning Twitter visualization that is also built on open web technology. As Morgamic kindly put it, we’d like to make this a “crazy utilization of the open web”.
I’m personally really excited about this project… we’re always looking for new tools to engage with our users and to celebrate our community, and I think a cool visualization of our Twitter activity will help encourage that. But to take this to the next level and kick-start the ideation process, I need your help.
How would you like to see our Twitter community visualized? What kinds of information or data types would you want to capture? To help guide your thinking and provide some inspiration, I’ve collected a set of the most creative Twitter visualizations from around the web. I also distilled these down to what I thought were key elements that made for a great visualization, and therefore required specs for what our visualization should be:
* Approachable: Captures meaningful data that’s relatively easy to digest by just about anyone.
* Beautiful: Presents the information through an artistic lens, and is generous in its use of color.
* Dynamic: Displays activity in real-time, conveying a constant state of movement through animated elements.
* Interactive: Allows users to play with design elements, and filter/search through the data with relevant tags.
* Unique: Takes inspiration from, but does not closely mimic, what has already been created.
With all that in mind, I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, and ideas around a potential design concept for our Twitter visualization. Please leave a comment and share your thoughts. I’m looking forward to hearing from you!
February 2nd, 20109:01 am at
[...] Blog Archive » Visualizing The Firefox Community on Twitter http://musingt.com/?p=208 [...]
February 2nd, 20109:45 am at
How about something that pulls firefox related tweets and geo data and maps them on a blue globe with bright orange …timelapsed on launch day so it looks like a ‘firey’ orange storm is spreading across the globe? Ala the firefox logo. I saw a visualization the other day of browser market share from 2004->now in a globe and it had a polar/circular aspect to it so the growth of firefox ended up looking like a swirl against the blue of IE …..
just thinkin out loud here …. have fun!
February 2nd, 20109:51 am at
Great post! I’d like to see something that’s pretty simple and easy to understand at a glance, but with a lot of motion and activity to reflect the vibrancy of the community. Can’t wait to see what you and morgamic come up with.
February 2nd, 201010:11 am at
Go interactive. Keep tweets limited to once a day except for major events.
February 2nd, 20101:33 pm at
This is a fantastic idea. Incorporating some aspects of the HTML 5 Canvas and Audio Experiment seems natural:
http://9elements.com/io/projects/html5/canvas/
I think a good visualization would include profile pictures, links to trending Firefox content, audio, and showing how community members connect with each other (similar to a social graph).
February 2nd, 20102:55 pm at
Glad we’re doing this… tweets are a great way to get a snapshot of what the world is thinking at any given moment and to be able to see what people are saying about Firefox and making it available to everyone is going to be awesome!
I just had a few thoughts on the elements I think are important for whatever visualization we do:
1. people: profile pics/avatars i think are a must. the designs tara highlighted that show people’s faces i think give it a human element that we need to represent our global community.
2. filters: this is already listed, but i think it’ll be great to not only filter by tags, but also the type of feedback/emotion associated with tweets. one example shows love/hate type filters… and i think it will be great to show both positive and negative messages (and the ability to filter them).
3. focus: while lots of moving pieces are cool, i think we should create something that has the coolness factor, but also enables users to focus on the content… i imagine something like the background animation going into slow-mo while a single tweet or groups of tweets are brought into clear focus when users are looking at the data.
4. feedback: displaying tweets will be awesome.. but enabling people to tweet from the app or join the conversation then and there will be even better. whether we allow users to login and tweet from the app or create a unique stream of comments that we integrate into the visualization somehow, i think a huge part of the interaction should be the ability to contribute content quickly and easily.
That’s all I got… I can’t wait to see what we come up with!
February 2nd, 20104:19 pm at
Thanks Jay, William, Glenn, John, and Chris for your feedback. A lot of great thoughts here so far
Very helpful. Please keep them coming! I’ll make sure to incorporate all of these thoughts into the final creative direction and considerations for the visualization.
February 2nd, 20106:16 pm at
Great post, Tara!
I would also add “location” to the list of essential things for the visualization. The Web (for the most part) is so devoid of boundaries. Being able to associate activity with a “place” or “location” allows those experiencing the visualization to be able to relate and contextualize the activity. Mozilla and Firefox’s strength comes from it’s community and the ability for that community to connect. Being able to represent those connections and responses to those connections in a visual is a way to differentiate ourselves from so many other visualizations, while still giving us the ‘relatable’ edge that could make this go viral.
February 2nd, 20107:07 pm at
I have had enough of firefox 3.6. Done and done. Shame how they destroy their reputation giving out crap program. #firefox3.6 @firefox
It crashes and or freezes constantly, I had to remove all and every single addon, still the same. I am on a Mac 10.5.8 and have 8 gigs of Ram, so do not tell me I am short of Ram. I lost all my book marks on this crap fireFox coz I just had to Zap it to hell and same my sanity. This is how reputation gets destroyed.
February 2nd, 20108:46 pm at
Can’t you guys show #firefox tweets on the firefox start up page like how google does when you search for a query? I think that is a great visualization idea to start with if you really want to see what people are saying about firefox. You can easily get the widget off of the Twitter goodies page if that would be easy for you. I’ll post more ideas when they arrive in my head.
February 2nd, 20109:03 pm at
Also maybe like Firefox Earth(Google Earth) sorting thing would be a nice visualization. Idk, lol good luck though.
February 7th, 20101:36 pm at
[...] Blog Archive » Visualizing The Firefox Community on Twitter http://musingt.com/?p=208 [...]
February 9th, 20106:25 am at
Tara, FYI this might be relevant as well…
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_user_data_analysis.php
February 9th, 20106:27 am at
Related/relevant new site is here: http://fanpageanalytics.com/
March 24th, 20103:26 pm at
[...] be evolving into a more robust engagement space in the near future – including an awesome Twitter visualization, and much more. This is an exciting step towards providing a better window into our social media [...]
March 24th, 201011:40 pm at
tweets related firefox, mozilla, mozilla hacks with some pictures and animations..
July 18th, 201011:22 am at
I like the social collider, twitter vision, and the tweet wheel. If the visualization could look something like a combination of these I think it will be a winner.