Though in it's earliest stages of development, a new app from Ordinal Malaprop, one of Second Life's more interesting dvelopers, promises to help Twitter users visualize their friends timelines, and incoming presence indicators known as "tweets" in 3D. I was privileged to spend a little time with Ordinal yesterday evening talking about the new tool, it's possible usefulness and the limitations of the Linden Scripting Language.
As you can see from above, at present the system is fairly basic. A proof of concept, if that. The potential is there though I think. If limitations in the LSL code that powers the generation, placement and deletion of the colored tweets you see can be overcome, it could prove to be a really fun way to visualize incoming data from friends' timelines on Twitter.
The biggest problem right now seems to be the limitations on memory. If you have a lot of friends, your SIM may get tweeted to death! As I left, Ordinal was thinking her way through that,and also about to ad some kind of conectors to the tweets radiating from "bomb" to make the whole visualization clearer.
Whether a truly useful tool emerges from this remains to be seen, but it sure was a fun app to see, and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.
So, what are we looking at there? I see a bomb and some colored dots.
It isn't terribly easy to see the point from a photograph, it must be said :) Basically it is a visual representation of a Twitter friends timeline At the moment, people are represented by consistent colours and angles from the centre, and age of tweet by square of distance from the centre (alpha also decreases, so that they fade away as they approach a set maximum age). The tweet fragments move as they age, and the actual content of the tweet can be seen by touching them.
I plan to go into further detail on my own journal, Mr Miles' comment section probably is not the best place for a detailed explanation, but it's really just an experiment as to how different parameters can be best expressed in visual form. Twitter provides quite good source material for this, as it helpfully aggregates lots of feeds into one simple form (well, in theory it does, in practice it seems to cache a lot of my requests).
Thanks, Ordinal.