Over at ReadWriteWeb, they’ve got the scoop on some pretty intense Information Visualization techniques applied to the mass of disorganization that is Twitter.
Let’s look at TwitterThoughts first. Here, Yvo takes a live Twitter API stream, parses it through a Yahoo! Pipes process, dumps the result in a giant MySQL database, then he uses the Google Visualization API to render the output as an interactive Flash chart. A lot of the heavy lifting here is done in the cloud, in freely available utilities. And the result? Let’s say Edward Tufte would feel comfortable putting it in his book, Envisioning Information.
