Some one in my twitter feed (sorry I couldn’t find the tip when I went back to look for it) pointed out the latest xefer project – Twitter Charts.

This elegant bubble chart shows my Twitter behavior on a matrix of day-of-week and time-of-day. The largest bubble reflects 13 tweets in that day/hour cell.

Why do I like this chart? It clearly and concisely shows my twitter behavior – with a bubble chart! (I’m not typically a fan)

Also, there’s no need for color here so xefer left it out! Remember, in chart design if you can leave something out (the removal doesn’t detract from the message) you should leave it out. Here, vertical scale tells me day of week, horizontal scale tells me time of day and the size of the dot tells me how much – those are the dimensions. Three dimensions, three indicators – no need to add more. xefer is offering some other charts – total by month, total by day-of-week, total-by-hour but they’re not as interesting as the above.

The other cool thing about these charts? xefer is using two competing services with a JS file for integration to make them. Yahoo! pipes are responsible for collecting the data from the Twitter API, the JS parses the data and then builds out Google Chart API calls to create the charts – hehehe! Now, it’s a little slow to run especially if you run a heavy Twitter user (I am not with just 303 tweets since I stared using it about a year and half ago). Try running Scoble and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Speaking of Scoble, here are his and Jeremiah Owyang’s charts, or why I’ll never be an A-Lister:

SCOBLEIZER 

The largest dots for Scoble are 295 tweets! So not only does Scoble beat me on an absolute scale (295 tweets in an hour, 12,207 total) look at the pattern! He Tweets all the time. Looks like the only times he doesn’t have any tweets are Saturday and Sunday in the early morning/late night.

He’s obviously quite serious about maintaining his noise level.

JEREMIAH OWYANG

Jeremiah ranks in with his biggest hours at 100 tweets. But look at the highly even distribution (in comparison to Scoble and I) from the hours of 4AM to 5PM. That’s thirteen hours of relatively consistent chatter per day!

Seriously, I couldn’t hope to maintain this level of participation so it’s no wonder that these guys are blogerati and I’m not.

Way to go xefer for creating a cool charting service by integrating two competing platforms!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 9:32 am and is filed under @jowyang, @scobleizer, Twitter, google chart api, visualization, yahoo pipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.