Twitter Timeline Visualisations

Ever wanted to make scrolling timeline visualisations of tweets?

Here's how.

You will need:

• The R environment for statistics and graphics (www.r-project.org)
• The twitteR and brew packages for R
• Some web space

 I'm using the MIT Simile Timeline widget to do all the hard work. All I need to do is get the tweets into the right format. To do that I wrote a little R program using the twitteR package to access tweets via the search API, and the brew package to reformat into XML. Here's my entire twitline function:

twitline <- function(q,outfile,num=15,...){
require(twitteR)
require(brew)
srch=searchTwitter(q,num=num,...)
brewSrc="

<% for(tweet in srch){ %>\
\"
title=\"<%=screenName(tweet) %>\">
<%=text(tweet) %>

<% } %>

"
brew(text=brewSrc,output=outfile)
}

Now all I do is: twitline("sea otters","twitter.xml",num=100) and I get an XML file in the right format. Read the timeline docs and you'll see that all you need is:

Timeline.loadXML("twitter.xml", function(xml, url) { eventSource.loadXML(xml, url); });

 in the right place in your javascript.

There's a few things need doing here, like scaling the timeline to the events on startup, maybe styling things a bit better, having a way to get more than 100 tweets, linking to twitter.com and so on. Consider it a start.

Also, the grabbing and conversion could easily be done in Python or [IYFPLH]. Even cooler would be on-the-fly updates. Check out the SIMILE docs for more ideas.

Barry