TweetWheel: Social Network Analysis for Twitter

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TweetWheel brings social network analysis to Twitter.

It shows relationships between Twitter users that all have a common friend. Here is my TweetWheel:

 Each 'spoke' represents one of my Twitter friends. Each line represents a connection between two of those friends to one another. The density of the bundle shows how many common friends they have with me, and with each other - the higher the density, the greater the number of common acquaintances.

Myself, I have two main communities that use Twitter: the IA/UXD/webgeek community, and the blogging community (including many on the Aussie Bloggers Forum). There is some overlap between these two communities as many webgeeks are bloggers too.

While TweetWheel is fascinating eye candy, I am not sure how useful this will be as a practical social network analysis tool to the likes of you and me.

In the intelligence world, social network analysis is used to piece together seemingly unrelated information facets. Operation AIR used something like TweetWheel to narrow down suspects in the Belanglo State Forest murders - out of several thousand possible suspects, only a few dozen had enough points of similarity (that is, enough link density) to place them in the area for the time of the murders, show history of certain criminal behavior, and some other factors that the police thought desirable. These dozens of suspects were then placed under human surveillance.

So - TweetWheel is cool: but is it useful?

Posted by AndrewBoyd on May 04, 2008 | Permalink
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