I’ve been playing around with the Python Twitter API and made a simple network visualization of people I follow. Links are made between people who follow each other.  Surprisingly, its not as trivial as one might imagine to get a list of names of people one follows, if the number of followees is greater than 100.  For ID’s the case is much simpler.  Here is a sketch of my network in 2D, written in Processing. Disentangling a network, well, that’s the fun part.  I’ll post again in the future as I develop better visualizations (maybe even in 3D!).

I’m doing this as a way to explore the information flows around me.  In this case, its pretty easy to get the twitter data.  But on a wider scope, once I have a map of where I am getting information, I can be more attentive to the diversity of sources I actively listen to.  This is in efforts to create tools that seek to move beyond information silos that can be created by social software.