« Previous post
Next post »

August 30, 2007

New Twitter Visualization Tools Coming: First Is Twitter Blocks

Michael Arrington

37 comments »

The Twitter team must have had a Red Bull machine installed at the offices, because suddenly they’re launching new stuff left and right.

They recently added search and Gmail import features to the service. And on Friday they are launching a new area of the site called “Explore” where they’ll list some of the tools people can use to interact with Twitter off the site itself. Along with Explore they will also be releasing a new visualization tool called Twitter Blocks - “an abstract way to navigate your Twitter neighborhood or block.

Twitter sent us these screen shots but we haven’t had a chance to see it in action yet. Cofounder Biz Stone says “It’s a crazy, interactive, animated 3D application so it’s easier to understand when you interact with it.”

Twitter brought in Stamen Design to help with the project, the same team behind some of the Digg visualization tools launched last year.

Motorola is sponsoring the new Explore site. Screen shots below:

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 9:17 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. Techomical

    August 30th, 2007 at 10:49 pm

  2. Linkpost | 31.8.2007 - TechPortal - Your Daily source for Tech news, views, reviews, tutorials, gadgets and lots more…

    August 31st, 2007 at 9:12 pm

  3. muhammad.saleem » twitter launches explore: an overview of twitter blocks

    September 1st, 2007 at 4:40 am

  4. New Twitter Visualization Tools Coming: First Is Twitter Blocks « the blog of huntaub

    September 1st, 2007 at 5:28 am

  5. Was sind Twitter-Blocks? at viralmythen

    September 11th, 2007 at 11:12 am

Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Duncan Riley

    August 30th, 2007 at 9:20 pm

    Twitter does Lego perhaps? Although the uptime has been better of late I still do wish that they’d spend more time working on stability than this sort of stuff :-)

  2. Steve Spalding

    August 30th, 2007 at 9:20 pm

    I still haven’t decided whether I love or hate the fact that Twitter refuses to actually -add- features to the application. On the plus side, they are one of the few sites that has stuck to their mission of simplicity over feature creep but on the other, having to hunt around for your perfect twitter setup isn’t exactly intuitive for anyone except the biggest tweet-geeks.

  3. www.bankblast.com

    August 30th, 2007 at 9:26 pm

    these are just as cool to watch and pointless use as the the digg tools !

  4. Pranjal

    August 30th, 2007 at 9:46 pm

    Same old web 2 story “coming and going”

  5. Martinez

    August 30th, 2007 at 9:50 pm

    I’m probably one of the only people in the world that thinks twitter is LAME. Along with DumbSpace and PimpleBook, twitter is a glorified IM client. Same old stuff on the internet… nothing new… dead.

    *yawn*

  6. Larry

    August 30th, 2007 at 10:14 pm

    Looks pretty interesting and I am eager to test it out when available, but if you are looking for a true social network wrapped around city “blocks” right now, I recommend checking out http://www.citypixel.com for that unique experience.

  7. Soso Sazesh

    August 30th, 2007 at 10:16 pm

    It looks like the new features are already functional.

  8. Soso Sazesh

    August 30th, 2007 at 10:47 pm

    Scratch that, they were up and now they’re not.

  9. Andrew

    August 30th, 2007 at 11:05 pm

    big deal

  10. no thanks

    August 30th, 2007 at 11:28 pm

    @martinez,

    Twitter is useless and annoying regardless of all the hype around it.

    They are not the first either.

  11. Tom Carden

    August 30th, 2007 at 11:41 pm

    Duncan - the Twitter team *have* been working on stability, that’s why they hired us (Stamen) to work on Blocks.

    bankblast - plenty of things are cool and useless if you stop to think about it (TV? movies? games?). So I don’t have a problem with that. But we’ve been using Blocks in the office for a couple of weeks now and I keep finding out new things that I wouldn’t have seen on my Twitter homepage. Worksforme!

    Larry - citypixel.com looks like Habbo Hotel for grown-ups to me :)

  12. Jeff S

    August 30th, 2007 at 11:42 pm

    Twitter has glue, will stick. It’s inventive, unique and the teens love it….hmm what other massive app did teens drive lately ??

  13. anujk

    August 30th, 2007 at 11:42 pm

    well!! I don’t think Twitter is useless… and the new feature add ons are pretty neat… nothing special though… but still its an advancement…

  14. Jimmy Soho

    August 30th, 2007 at 11:44 pm

    Anybody else having problems posting tweets to twitter at this moment? Every tweet I send seems to go to void.

  15. TechDumpster (living in First Life)

    August 31st, 2007 at 12:26 am

    Yawn. What a waste of life.

  16. Nicole Simon

    August 31st, 2007 at 2:14 am

    It is disappointing to see what actually is added. More features to discover new people? This is like more ways to discover ‘new customers’ instead of working the ones you already have, who already are invested in the product and you could potentially make money off instead of loosing it on them.

    The youngest addidtion of yet again getting ‘more’ users begs the question if or if not twitter is trying to head for an exit.

    As proven with Odeo - they are great with doing something first, and heading it first - but then please let somebody take over the real business, for the sake of the user and the shareholder.

    The richness of the ecosystem shows how little they actually would have to do to get others to get more functionality basically for free. Disappointing.

    I really hope pownce is paying attention; as they have a lot of the stuff needed already in place though they missed out on the parts where twitter gets the user going for them.

  17. Mark Evans

    August 31st, 2007 at 7:22 am

    I’d still like to see Twitter use some of that Red Bull to come up with a business plan. It’s one thing to make the service more useful but another kettle of fish to figure out how to make money from its users. Personally, I don’t get why Twitter has gained so much traction but maybe I’m just missing something.

  18. Michal Migurski

    August 31st, 2007 at 7:58 am

    Nicole, maybe you don’t understand what Blocks is doing: it helps *existing twitter users* discover *other existing twitter users*. People they might know, haven’t yet encountered, but might want to. This has nothing to do with senselessly attracting fresh blood, but it does improve the experience for people new to the party trying to figure out who’s already there.

  19. Dave Winer

    August 31st, 2007 at 9:21 am

    Nicole, I agree — we’re being used as monkeys to help increase their market capitalization.

    Mark, their business plan is to be acquired by a telco for big bucks. I don’t say that based on inside info, rather by reading tea leaves.

  20. Dave Winer

    August 31st, 2007 at 9:22 am

    Also, I think they could use some of the features Pownce has.

    But they have one feature Pownce doesn’t — users. Lots of em.

    It’d be interesting to know how many each has, but Twitter feels much richer.

    Even so, now that they have the search feature, it’s more obvious how many people I know are NOT on Twitter (I can search for them and not find them now).

  21. Ira

    August 31st, 2007 at 10:23 am

    Does anyone actually read other people’s twitters? They are boring as hell. That is why I think twitter will ultimately die, tons of content creation but 0 readers.

  22. Alexis

    August 31st, 2007 at 11:56 am

    This post was a waste of time until I saw the reference to citypixel.com. Now that’s something unique. I prefer the Sims meets myspace at citypixel to Q*bert :-)

  23. Nat

    August 31st, 2007 at 1:33 pm

    Ira - Maybe you just don’t have interesting friends? ;)

    In all reality, I find it interest to hear about what other people are experiencing on other parts of the planet. One really cool instance was searching through the public stream and finding others who were at the same conference as me, and then meeting them in real life.

  24. callingbull

    August 31st, 2007 at 6:30 pm

    Twitter *needs* something like Jaiku channels.
    Twitter *needs* better stability and working features (page2 broken).

    Twitter does not need silly stuff like blocks.

    Stamen has done really cool work in the past but this is not one of their better efforts.

  25. Paul Levinson

    August 31st, 2007 at 7:44 pm

    actually, for it’s worth, I get a couple of hundred reads per week from twitters I put out about my blog posts on infiniteregress.tv and lightonlightthrough.com - not much more than 1 percent of my overall reads - but, hey, every little bit helps … (and twitter’s also good for announcing radio and tv appearances)…

  26. techmine

    August 31st, 2007 at 8:18 pm

    bekaar site hai yaar..(Twitter is — *yawn*).

  27. TechMalaya

    August 31st, 2007 at 9:18 pm

    awesome twitter tools. i wonder how far twitter apps will go.

  28. Christoph

    September 1st, 2007 at 7:14 am

    Looks kinda fun, but essentially those tools are not that interesting once their novelty factor wears off. Might be a good marketing tool for Twitter to attract new users, who doesn’t get excited when they see themselves in some fancy visualization tool. The only additional visualization I know that works well is the Digg Spy. It adds a different perspective while remaining very easy to use.

  29. Greg J. Smith

    September 2nd, 2007 at 11:05 pm

    I think these types of visualizations are useful only so far as they help you understand information better. That said, I think this is marginally interesting.. not the best visualization I’ve seen lately, but somewhat useful. As a twitter user it is helpful to lay out connections (and their connections) as a 2D grid.. I don’t think the system is that intuitive though, but it is a start.

    Regarding the reference above to DiggLabs.. I actually think those are pretty useful. I wish the twitter visualization were as interesting.

  30. Don Jones

    September 3rd, 2007 at 8:02 am

    If a data visualization is more useful than text, then it makes sense to do it. Otherwise, it’s just eye candy, and as such, not very filling…

  31. Bob Warfield

    September 3rd, 2007 at 10:22 am

    The desireability of things like this is in the eye of the beholder. People have different Learning Styles, and these styles give different folks a marked preference for how they engage with the Web. Twitter itself is very controversial in this way: some people love it and some people hate it.

    I’ve been putting together a theory of how these Personality Styles map to different Web 2.0 applications:

    http://smoothspan.wordpress.co.....ity-types/

  32. Benedikt

    September 11th, 2007 at 11:09 am

    I find it quite fascinating that Twitter can release a new tool like Twitter Blocks without explaining anything about it. How it works, what is it for, why you should spend your time using it - all that is left to the user to figure out. I guess that’s because they don’t know it themselves.

« Previous post
Next post »