[TSTIL] Social Gravity

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[ This is a part of "The Software That I Love", a series of posts about Software that I created or had a small part in ]

2011 - Social Gravity

I got onto twitter in 2010 and at some point realized the immense knowledge stored in the network. If you know who someone follows, and who follows that user, it tells you a lot.

With javascript webworkers I created Social Gravity. A 2d visualization of someone's network, all followers and their relationships. It had a small gravity engine, where you push away everyone by default, but if you follow someone, you attract them. If users get closer you repel them exponentially, so that the network does not collapse into a single point.

Magically little groups of your different spheres of influence or interests appeared. If you hovered over an area, it highlighted frequent keywords in the bios of the twitter accounts. You can try to market yourself in any way you like, but your network doesn't lie.

As twitter restricted their APIs a lot, and I was very busy with my cool new day job at Mendix, this project died down. I created a video with how it worked here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyVUMTVarpQ . It's a bit embarrassing because it tells you so much about my interests back then. Anyway, most social network APIs don't expose this data anymore, but they use this data for all kinds of advertisement targeting. Pretty scary.





next: 2012 - autopullpep8 and the facebook adventure

previous: 2011 - newnode.py

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