Vizualizing Twitter

I’ve now been using Twitter for about six months. While Twitter’s minimalism is no doubt responsible for much of its success, I often pine for some additional social networking features. High up on that list is a simple way of representing my closest neighbors—perhaps through a visualization—without having to manually navigate individual users’ following/followers pages. A well designed representation could be useful in a number of ways:

1. It could expose previously unknown mutual relationships (i.e., “Wow, I didn’t know X and Y knew each other!);
2. It could reveal mutual acquaintances whom one did not know were on Twitter; and
3. Metrics on the social network could be aggregated (e.g., degrees of separation).

This afternoon I spent an hour or so hacking together a Python script, which I have dubbed TwitterGraph, to accomplish this. Here is an example of the ~100 people nearest to me in the network:

The code for TwitterGraph follows at the end of this post. The code depends on the simplejson module and also imagemagick. It uses the Twitter API to construct the network graph. You don’t need to have a Twitter account for this to work; it doesn’t require authentication. Each IP is, however, limited to 100 API calls per hour, unless your IP has been whitelisted. My script takes this into account. Each Twitter user requires three API to download their information, so one can load about 33 users per hour before reaching the rate limit. TwitterGraph saves its data, so successive calls will continue off where it previously left. Finally, TwitterGraph also calculates the PageRank algorithm).

Usage: paste the code below into TwitterGraph.py and run the following:

$ chmod 755 ./TwitterGraph.py
$ ./TwitterGraph.py
You have 100 API calls remaining this hour; how many would you like to use now? 80
What is the twitter username for which you'd like to build a graph? ESultanik
Building the graph for ESultanik (output will be ESultanik.dot)...
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$ dot -Tps ESultanik.dot -o ESultanik.ps && epstopdf ESultanik.ps && acroread ESultanik.pdf
$ dot -Tsvgz ESultanik.dot -o ESultanik.svgz

There are also (unnecessary) command line options, the usage for which should be evident from the sourcecode.