Thanks to my buddy Digitalmind, he send me the link of the Social Colliders website. The service analyzes Twitter and shows a chart based on a keyword and corresponding posts. Here is an image of the output:

The creators of Social Collider describe that they build the service “With the Internet’s promise of instant and absolute connectedness, two things appear to be curiously underrepresented: both temporal and lateral perspective of our data-trails. Yet, the amount of data we are constantly producing provides a whole world of contexts, many of which can reveal astonishing relationships if only looked at through time.”

It’s easy to use the service: Enter a keyword, choose search from “user”, “phrase” or “trends”, select the length of the history from one day to one month and hit the “collide!”-button. A blank grid opens, like shown in the picture above. Then, slowly, the chart gets dotted while the service is processing the data. The dots represent post, they are seperated horizontal with a column for each user. On the left side is the selected timeline, starting with the actual date on top. It’s fun to watch the number of dots growing over the chart. The Posts are connected with line so the flow of the conversation is visible and these connections organically grew from one post to another.

That’s really nice. But I would like to see some functions to digg deeper and easier into the data. Sorry for this, but the processed information is not very useful. The first thing I would invent is a button do “deactivate” the growing connections between posts. A simple static view does the same and is faster. I would like to see the reply posts between users with a dropdown to define “friends” from two to ten replies as a minimum criteria. The visualisation of this data should show the numbers of relevant posts between users (or what we’ve defined as “friends”). The last function is a dropdown to select the actual number of followers in steps of thousands. This criteria is important in correlation to the number of replies a user sends a “friend”. With this options this tool would compute the real social collusion!

Social Collider is a great example of state-of-the-art infodesign using real time web technology. The layout is perfect, the colors are well chosen, tooltips with message include a change of the grid in the background. Really good work from the design point of view. Kudos!