Lehrblogger

My presentation last week of TwiTerra at the NY Tech Meetup went very well. A PDF of the space in which the presentations are given is here, and thanks to @jprytyskacz for linking it. I think people enjoyed my presentation, and I had good conversations with several people about Twitter and other technologies at the IAC and especially at the bar where everyone went to meet afterward.

This NYTM was the first one organized by Nate Westheimer, who was sworn in at the beginning of the meeting by previous organizer (and Meetup.com co-founder) Scott Heiferman. Here’s a video of the ‘ceremony’, and if you watch carefully you’ll see that it’s my MacBook that they used :)

The event got a fair amount of press, and here’s a collection of the articles that mentioned my project:

• Built on Twitter at the New York Tech Meetup on Advertising Age
• Cool things powered with Twitter on Connecting not Schmoozing
• Heiferman Swears in New NY Tech Meetup Organizer on NYConvergence
• NYTM #49 – Inauguration and twitter Apps on the blog of Sanford Dickert
• NY Tech Meetup – January 2009 on Whitney Hess’ blog Pleasure & Pain
• Just An Online Minute… Hi! My Name Is… What? My Name is… Who? My Name is… Tech Meetup on Just an Online Minute

In addition, lots of people were posting to Twitter during the event itself:

• “‘Twitter brings the world together’ #NYTM” – @ksowocki
• “Mapping retweets on a globe / #NYTM” – @JamesBruni
• “Twiterra. See how how Twitter triggers connections around the world. Cool, but dizzying. http://is.gd/c5dU” – @pleeds
• “TwiTerra shows geographical influence of tweets and retweets – http://bit.ly/QdH6” – @frank_dobner
• “RT@twiterra: More info at http://twiterra.com Follow me to be notified when this Twitter bot goes live!” – @jprytyskacz
• “I recommend f @nytm and @twiterra were at #NYTM tonite.” – @jprytyskacz
• “Twiterra. See which conversations have the biggest reach.” – @mrduane
• “#NYTM With rate of adoption at current levels, Twittera could be very cool when more Twitter users outside US. Now seeing isolated examples.” – @mcaldecutt
• “Next up – twiterra – I blogged on this from the ITP show in Dec. – cool app follow rts around globe” – @kdtalcott

Whitney Hess (whose blog is linked above) live-tweeted the whole event, and these were the ones that were specifically relevant:

• “#nytm Tonight’s theme is “Built on Twitter” featuring @StockTwits @ShortyAwards @CoTweet @TwiTerra @Klout @Shakeshack< /a> @Botanicalls” – @whitneyhess
• “#nytm Steven Lehrburger of @TwiTerra is up now, showing how retweets span across the globe. Pretty sweet. Just saw @alanataylor RT @ mklopez” – @whitneyhess
• “#nytm @lehrblogger is using the NASA World Wind libraries to create it. @innonate asks why we care. “Exposes people to new ideas”" – @whitneyhess

Also, if you happen to find any photos or video of me presenting on Tuesday, *please* send them to me! I was too busy worrying about other things, and half forgot to ask someone to take a couple photos, and half assumed there were enough cameras in the room that it would happen on it’s own. I haven’t been able to find any yet, so let me know if you do.

For my second project for the 4-in-4, I decided to fly to California so that I could be there to present TwiTerra to the monthly meeting of the Bay Area Scala Enthusiasts (BASE) at the Twitter offices in San Francisco. Jorge Ortiz (the friend who has been teaching me the language) was planning to present it anyway, but I decided that it was worth it for me to be there in person. Since I only have one day for each project, and since I need to be here on the other days to do other projects and help coordinate, I’m going to be gone less than 24 hours. I’m looking forward to a longer-than-five-minute discussion of the project and its implementation, and I’ll post again afterward.

(The presentation at the NY Tech Meetup went very well, and I will post about that later.)

As of the time of this writing, I have 161,984 tweets in the database. 72,215 of them are root tweets, or original tweets that were then retweeted but are not retweets themselves. This means that most of my chains of retweets consist only of one original tweet and one retweet. Furthermore, of these original root tweets,

• 9,872 have at least two retweets
• 3,063 have at least three retweets
• 1,435 have at least four retweets
• 738 have at least five retweets
• 461 have at least six retweets
• 286 have at least seven retweets
• 199 have at least eight retweets
• 152 have at least nine retweets
• 109 have at least ten retweets

So, of all retweets, less than three twentieths of one percent have ten or more retweets. There are, however, several very interesting tweets with over one hundred retweets. They are as follows:

• shefinds (115 retweets) : @shefinds is giving away a $500 #Kmart Gift Card on her blog – simply tweet or comment to enter http://urlbrief.com/22d898
• eMom (158 retweets) : @eMom is giving away a $500 Kmart Gift Card on her blog – simply comment or tweet to enter : http://urlbrief.com/7dfb6c I want you to win!
• karllong (133 retweets) : @karllong is giving away 10 x $25 gift certificates for http://threadless.com – just RT this to enter, will tweet the winners
• Camiseteria (266 retweets) : @camiseteria vai sortear 5 vale-compras de R$55 do http://camiseteria.com. Retweet essa mensagem para participar. Google translates this from Portuguese as “@ camiseteria will raffle 5-worth of $ 55 purchases of http://camiseteria.com. Retweet this message to participate.”
• chrisbrogan (145 retweets) : Please retweet the HELL out of this post: http://is.gd/ezGB
• Armano (115 retweets) : OK, here’s the favor. It’s a big one. For big hearts. Please help. http://is.gd/eKbo Please retweet.

Some of these are not surprising – @chrisbrogan has over 32,000 followers, so when he tweets about something as important to the Twitter community as Twitter phishing scams, especially when that tweet is short, it will get retweeted a lot. @armano has only (only) 8,387 followers, but his tweet is compellingly humanitarian, and I can see the appeal of retweeting it.

The first four, however, are fascinating viral marketing campaigns. @shefinds has only 1,208 followers, @eMom has considerably more at 7,294 followers, @karllong has 2,774 followers, and @camiseteria has 4,767 followers.

An unusually large fraction of the followers of each of these accounts retweeted these viral messages. By intertwining the methodology of spreading the idea (“retweet this”) with an incentive (“to enter this contest”) the accounts were able to market the brand of whatever they were selling (as well as the brand of that specific account) to large audiences at low cost and low annoyance (clearly no one who retweeted it was annoyed with the message, and if a recipient of a retweet was annoyed, that is likely to be annoyance with the retweeter and not the brand). Remember that the retweet counts are not the number of people who received a message, but are instead the number of people who broadcast it – actual numbers of recipients would likely be one or more magnitudes larger.

Finally, note that these are only the retweets with associated geographic data – because I planned to display them on the globe, those are the only ones I kept in the database. Based on my informal observations while watching the application run of the other retweets in the database, there are not very many that either start in or are retweeted from South America. Thus the huge number of Brazil retweets that Camiseteria got that had geographic data associated with them is probably only the tip of the iceberg of retweets that did not have geographic data. I imagine that the t-shirt company got a huge amount of exposure for very little effort and very little cost.

I’ve made a slight modification of TwiTerra to highlight the Camiseteria retweets. Most retweets are in Brazil (where the original tweet was), but they also stretch to a variety of other places. (I’ll add that I came across that particular t-shirt store over a year ago; I can’t remember the circumstances, but they have nice shirts.) Download a Mac, Windows, or Linux version, be patient as it launches, and be sure to spin around the globe to Japan – two of the retweets are there, and the travelling of the information is visualized as going in opposite directions around the world from Brazil to Japan :)

I am now using Maven instead of Eclipse to build my TwiTerra project (thanks again to Jorge for teaching me a bit about Maven), and I’ve also (finally!) started to use Git / GitHub for source version control. You can view the project here – http://github.com/lehrblogger/twiterra-retweetglobe/ – and please feel free to fork the project and extend it! And contact me with questions or ideas for cool things to make!

Also, I’ve made some significant improvements to the code, and it should now require much less RAM. I’ve made packages of TwiTerra that will run on both Mac and Windows computers. Both should open full-screen and without menu bars, so press Command-Q or Alt-F4 to exit. It requires an internet connection to run, and please be patient as it initializes the globe and database connection on startup.

Download the Mac version here – it should run as a normal application without any further steps.

Download the Windows version here – be sure to follow the instructions in the readme to get it working.

Download a Linux version here – I have no idea if it works and have no computer to test it on, but I thought I’d offer it anyway.

I’m presenting TwiTerra at the NY Tech Meetup this Tuesday January 6th at 7pm. It will be at the IAC building, and more info is at http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/calendar/9409301/.

I had been going regularly to the monthly meetings, but had to stop last semester because they conflicted with my Applications class. When I went to look at this month’s meeting, I noticed they were looking for presenters, so I posted about TwiTerra. The organizers decided to give the meetup the theme “Built on Twitter”, and my project fit right in.

It should be an interesting night, and you can RSVP at that first link. Kate Hartman (former ITP student and now adjunct faculty) is also presenting a project called Botanicalls.

There’s a fair amount of preparation for me to do (beautifying the code, printing business cards, writing blog posts like this one), but I’m very excited!

project page here with previous posts and a new video

(I apologize for not posting again sooner on this project – things got pretty hectic as the show neared, and I kept the project page (linked above) up to date instead.)

On December 17th and 18th I presented TwiTerra at ITP’s Winter Show – an estimated 2400 people attended to see the 100+ student projects on display. People seemed to enjoy my visualization, and it was a lot of fun (and exhausting) to explain it so many times to so many different people. My standard line was, “Hi, are you familiar with Twitter?”

I’d like to thank everyone who took pictures at the show, especially second-year ITP student David Steele Overholt, whose photos are below:

TwiTerra got mentioned in several write-ups of the show (let me know if you know of more!

• Nerdabout New York: ITP Winter Show 2008
• Wiredset / Blogs / Mark Ghuneim: ITP Winter Show 2008 – Highlights
• Infringing Actions: Report from NYU’s ITP Winter Show

A list of general online press from the show can be found here.

Notably, several people at the show mentioned Facebook’s Project Palantir, a “project that visualizes all the data Facebook receives.” I hadn’t known of it until after the show (perhaps I was too busy with TwiTerra and missed when the link was spreading), but is another globe-based visualization of online communication. It doesn’t show the actual content of the messages, though (and can’t, since Facebook users expect privacy), and it’s something only Facebook employees/engineers could build (since the rest of us don’t have access to that data). Twitter, in contrast, makes its data publicly available and easily accessible via a powerful API.

Finally, I want to thank everyone who helped at various stages of this project, especially my friend Jorge Ortiz (who finally has a blog!), my instructor Dan Shiffman (who can look at a function in a programming language he doesn’t know and instantly find a way to make it two thirds shorter and much simpler), and Patrick Murris of the World Wind Development Team for his prompt responses to a few technical issues I had.