Top Ten Social Media Visualisation Toys
It seems that top ten lists are all the rage, so I hate to be missing out…
Following my recent post on “Analysing and Graphing Social Network Content“, the most popular on this site to date, here’s my list of some tools that let you visualise the social media universe. It’s an eclectic mixture of data analysis tools and pretty things.
10. Fidg’t
http://www.fidgt.com/visualize
Sometimes it can be useful to see find friends with similar interests. Fidg’t allows you to use tags as a “magnet”… all your Flickr and Last.FM friends get drawn towards the magnet if they have a similar interest. Could be fun. I had no idea Rene liked Avril Lavigne so much.
9. BrowseDelicious
http://www.ivy.fr/revealicious/demo/spacenav.html
I use Del.icio.us as a place to store my bookmarks and useful links. It’s nice to know they’ll still be around if I change computer. It can also be used to share links with others without emails flying around, or find links on a specific subject. All those words can be SO boring, however, so this is a tool where you can get a visual overview how your tags are structured and posts that relate to them. Or something.
8. Friend Mapper
http://www.bookfaced.com/fb/
A Google Maps mash-up for Facebook. See, geographically, where all your friends are.
7. Digg Arc
http://labs.digg.com/swarm/
What issues are troubling the poor Digg users? Find out here. The bigger the circle, the more “Diggs” a story has received. Like all the Digg visualisation tools, it’s not particularly helpful, but there’s no doubt it makes data look cool.
6. Friendwheel
http://thomas-fletcher.com/friendwheel/
If you have a large Facebook following, this could be useful as a tool to help you visualise the connections between your friends. Although it might leave you wondering just how they know each other and what they’re saying about you…
5. Here’s something similar: http://nexus.ludios.net/view/demo/
4. Twitter Blocks
http://explore.twitter.com/blocks/
Twitter, the service where you can “microblog” in 140 characters or less, has never been prettier. The idea is that it makes it easier to find new people by visualising not just your network, but your friends’ networks too. It’s a bit unstable, mostly because Twitter is right now.
3. Debategraph
http://debategraph.com/
Their goal is “to make the best arguments on all sides of any debate freely available to all and continuously open to challenge and improvement by all”. It’s one to watch.
2. Twingly
http://www.twingly.com/screensaver
A screensaver rather than a web site, this visualises blog activity in real time. They have seduced me with a video:
1. Twitter Vision
http://twittervision.com/
See “tweets” - as posts to the Twitter service are known - from around the world in real time. Another mashup with Google Maps, it’s evesdropping on a world of conversation. I’ve always believed maps are a wonderful place to analyse information, and somehow this rather simple tool makes the tweets seem more “real”.
Hope you have fun with these. Keep in mind that you’re unlikely to find in-depth network analysis tools on the web - it’s a complex business and you have to go to the professionals. However, these are a taste of some of the methods we can use to bring lists of social networking information to life.
Have some social media visualisation tools you love? Let’s hear about them!
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[...] 4TM Social Media Marketing » Top Ten Social Media Visualisation Toys Cool list of some tools that let you visualise the social media universe. It’s an eclectic mixture of data analysis tools and pretty things. (tags: social-media visualization) [...]