Twitter Streaming Importer : Naoyun as a Gephi Plugin

Totetmatt

Hello everybody !

Great news today, almost a 5 years acheivement : Twitter Streaming Importer is out.

It uses the Twitter Stream API to get current tweets and display them as a graph in realtime in gephi.

Is basically a simple version of Naoyun embeeded to Gephi, which will be easier to use for everybody I hope.

It embeed the 3 main network logic with little update on it :

  • User Network : Still a User to User network, but with Gephi 0.9 , we can now have parallel edges, which means now this network logic will differentiate a "Retweet" and a "Mention". Moreover, each reference with update the weight of the edges.
  • Smart Full network : Creates a full graph of a tweet activity.
  • Hashtag Network : Doing a graph based only on hashtags.

Just download it from Gephi, in Tools > Plugin and follow the steps.

You will need to have a twitter account and to create a dummy application here https://apps.twitter.com/ to use the plugin.

What's on the pipe for next version of the plugin

  • Enhance the data : For the moment, only the "label" is used, in the future it should be possible to have all the metadata from a tweet , a user etc....
  • Twitter API Key : It's a persistant problem , the model of Twitter to access their API isn't design for Open source desktop project. It need to check with the Gephi guys how it would be possible to ease the Key registration for the User.
  • Custom Network Logic : It's technically possible today to have your own Network logic used in the Plugin. The process and the way to do it just need to be reviewed.
  • Access to the sample stream api
  • Adding possibility to track per Localisation

It's not the end for Naoyun

Naoyun won't die and will keep some specificities that could not be transfered to the Gephi Plugin. But for the moment, the developpement is slowed down due to some dependencies issues and permanent refactoring.

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