Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.
Firehose
Update (June 20th): the 'Firehose' app described in this post relied on Twitter's public timeline IM support, which has been down for several days in a row. Firehose will return when Twitter gets their stuff back online.
About a week ago I made a proof of concept Flash site that I'm calling Firehose. It shows every post from Twitter's public timeline as fast as it can, in a BigSpy style.
I wasn't sure whether to make it public any time soon, but given how interesting people are finding sites like Twistori the time seems right. Blaine mentioned it on the Gillmor Gang podcast yesterday, and it hasn't gone down since so I assume it will cope with more viewers!
I'm using the XIFF actionscript 3 library to speak to a server running OpenFire, and that server has a bot that broadcasts items from Twitter's public timeline as XMPP (Jabber) instant messages to everyone viewing the Flash site. The main reason it needs its own server is because for socket communication Flash is only allowed to connect to the domain it was served from, and therefore it can't connect to Google Talk or AIM from any server I can host it on.
Anyway, you can probably tell that I'm more interested in the technology than whether it's useful or not. It really is just a proof of concept. It's a bit silly because it's too fast to be readable. But it works! (Except when it doesn't. Let me know in the comments if it doesn't work for you?)
Silly or not, Firehose does expose one tiny piece of functionality right now. There's no filtering yet, but it currently highlights "twitter" by default, and you can see what it looks like with other words highlighted by using the URL #fragment, like this, or this, or this.
Clearly there are several next steps I could take with this. The same setup could also be used to subscribe to a particular set of users, or tracked keywords, or (with a little more server-side work) to geocode the tweets and plot them on a map, TwitterVision style. We're just getting started with this, and Twitter is the only public jabber bot I know of with this kind of volume of output (this BBC one looks interesting too though).
NB:– Twitter is a former client of my employer Stamen but we're not working with them officially at the moment. This is the same Jabber PubSub feed they made public a few weeks back, that people are mainly using to power Twitter search engines.
The Importance of Perspective
I'm reading Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions at the moment. Our protagonist, Kilgore Trout, is hitch-hiking in a truck which has PYRAMID written on it in massive letters. He wonders about the implications:
"Trout wondered what a child who was just learning to read would make of a message like that. The child would suppose that the message was terrifically important, since somebody had gone to the trouble of writing it in letters so big."
I often wonder the same thing about blogging, twittering, linking on del.icio.us, open source programming, and so on. The things we do in public, on the web, aren't always that significant. And yet to a passing reader they must appear to be very important to us. It seems that often we don't get around to writing the important stuff down, precisely because it matters so much.
My new year's resolution is to take time to write the important stuff down, in MASSIVE LETTERS.
More Musings on Uselessness
Blocks has been out almost a week and the dust is settling a little. Off the cuff remarks are fading out and thoughtful responses are emerging. The second post on Visual Methods, a new blog from MIT Comparitive Media Studies student mike_d, has some good feedback.
I won't address his specific criticisms of Blocks here because agree with a lot of them and we're working on improvements that should go some way to addressing them. However, I do take issue with beginning criticism of the piece using the "standards of canonical information visualization". This relates to the uselessness posts Mike and I made earlier in the week.
Mike_d calls me out on my Techcrunch comment, suggesting that I want both useful and useless at the same time:
No offense to Tom, but it sounds like he's playing both sides! He admits to its potential uselessness but simultaneously suggests that that it is quite functional. Based on Stamen's previous work, I do think they are trying to produce useful information tools and not just pretty designs, but justifications like this seem like an easy way out of more careful consideration of their design. And frankly, the "works for me" defense seems completely antithetical to the principles of information visualization!
I really don't think I'm playing both sides here. Unfortunately, when I respond to people who think Blocks is useless, I'm conceding terms and fighting an uphill battle to make my real point. Perhaps that's a mistake (and yet here I am again).
I think that people who insist on evaluating Blocks as a tool - and conclude that it's useless - are wrong: I've found it useful myself, hence the "worksforme" comment on Techcrunch. But what I really think is that they're looking too hard for the purpose and utility of it before appreciating that it's really a way to look at Twitter from a different angle. I don't think it needs to start from a position of usefulness to be interesting. Furthermore, it's not that it is/isn't useful, it's whether utility is the guiding concern. For us (with Blocks) it wasn't.
(image by Mike, illustrating my words, as a response to Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino's post)
At Stamen we're knowingly operating on a fine line between aesthetic-driven visualisation (effective information visualisation that is also beautiful) and data-driven aesthetics (beautiful things that also represent data). It's a largely unexplored line (perhaps the area that Mike_d's first post has identified as emerging) that I would compare to the line between designer/coder that I comfortably and steadfastly occupy every day.
Fundamentally though, Blocks is a visualisation of Twitter and its users for Twitter and its users, by Twitter and its users. We have made an attempt to make it understandable for people who don't use the service, but that's a hard task and it's confounded if you're looking for something that's not there.
There aren't really any metrics there, just the things that people said in the order that they said them. Squared.
Criticism for Twitter Blocks
We finally kicked Twitter Blocks out of the door yesterday. It's been in development for about a month, mainly by Ryan Alexander and myself (but all Ryan whilst I was working on Oakland Crimespotting, he's a star). It's the first time we've done 3D things using Flash and it's amazing what's being done with Papervision3D at the moment. On the other hand, having 3D shoe-horned into the 2D Flash engine means the learning curve is a lot steeper than the native-3D Processing/OpenGL worlds Ryan and I are used to.
Whenever Stamen launches a new thing, my immediate reaction is a sigh of relief followed by a slightly obsessive-compulsive trawl of what people are saying about it online. (I use a combination of alerts from Technorati, Google Blog Seach and Bloglines to keep track).
The interesting thing about working with companies like Digg and Twitter is that your work inherits all the criticisms and detractors of those sites as well. Digg's users are clamouring for a picture section, so when we launched Digg Arc many of the responses ignored the piece entirely and chastised Digg for paying attention to visualisation and not to the main site. The same argument is already being used against Twitter Blocks, even though the amount of time Twitter's developers put into it was tiny compared to the amount of time they're putting into stability and new features.
Don't get me wrong: some of the early feedback we're getting is very positive, the team at Twitter have been very receptive and we're proud of our work. This much is good. Some of the feedback we're getting points out that the work isn't immediately understandable (I agree, and maybe we could do some more explaining, but I think we're OK for now).
However, there is also a strong and steady flow of negative comments that I've gathered here so I can think about them all in one place.
“Pretty visualization but I doubt its practicality.” PoppuPot
“Twitter Blocks is the kind of thing that demos well at conferences. Not too useful in real life.” Dave Winer
“exploring myneighbourhood : fun 3D view but so what? not sure i will do that everyday.” jean-michel gobet
“Well its interesting that its a new Twitter toy, but I just don't get it. Functional?” programwitch
“Puzzled but Entertained” … “Not really got the slightest idea why this is anything other than an interesting folly.” Tom Coates
“What is the point? Beats me.” Russel Heimlich
“I have to say I was absolutely gobsmacked by how utterly pointless it is.” EirePreneur
(The last one is, short of a personal insult, pretty much the harshest thing anyone has ever said about work I've been involved in.)
To address Tom Coates' point, if you're entertained we've done our job. If you're puzzled then maybe we can help explain things better next time. But I don't mind if some of our work is seen as a folly (“an extravagant, frivolous or fanciful building, designed more for artistic expression than for practicality”). Not everything that everyone does has to be useful or profound. (Nevermind that we've personally found Twitter Blocks a useful way to explore the Twitter network in the last few weeks, with frequent remarks of “I didn't know X was on Twitter”).
Jim Bumgardner (aka KrazyDad, author of O'Reilly's Flickr Hacks) addressed the “so what?” response to frivolous work in a blog post called Utility is Overrated a couple of months back. In the comments there's a comparison with Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation. In it, she states that “interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art”. I don't want to point at Twitter Blocks and say “art” (the Motorola sponsorship in particular makes that tricky) but I think that people are thinking too hard about things if they're looking for the “point” of it.
I'm not asking that people stop casting a critical eye over what's presented to them, especially when it's being hyped to death and it's commercially branded. It's fine to ask “what's it for?”, especially of new tools or things that aim to improve the efficiency or effectiveness of this or that. But why not also accept that some things might just be for entertainment and ask “am I having fun” once in a while instead of looking for a problem to be solved or an important statement to be read? Some things just are.
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