Data & Stuff // Neil Houston

A lot of people are aware of what Twitter is like as a service, but what do we know about how it looks like internally? Apart from the fact that it has a nice plush office

I’ve always been interested in ‘Where Twitter Might Go’ – both from their infrastructure, staffing and the future products/services they may be rolling out. Thanks to Twitter opening up a job site, we can get a picture as to what they are planning to do in the future.

The obvious is regarding monetisation, it’s taken a while but there are now ‘official’ rumours that some form of an ‘ad platform’ will be launched at SXSWi next month where Evan Williams, the Twitter CEO will be one of the Keynote speakers.

This is backed up, by the fact they are actively recruiting for product marketing, and software engineers to work on monetisation.

What’s more interesting, to me, is the other jobs on offer. Especially regarding data analysts, and data visualisation. Just recently Twitter mentioned that the twittersphere are tweeting at a rate of 50,000 times a day.

That’s a lot of data being put out there, a lot of opportunity for text semantics, trend analysis, and harvesting the information. Which makes sense for Twitter to be after data analysts etc. Though the fact they are actively moving into the visualisation market is interesting. Below is a visual they made at the time of the Superbowl, tracking both mentions of the Superbowl, and contextual analysis around the brands being mentioned.

To me, the combination of their active recruitment in these two areas is an indicator that they may be releasing in the future, a tool that allows for the contextual and semantic analysis of Your Brand, they are slowly rolling out corporate tools (like being able to say who a Tweet was attributed to without having to use ^NH etc)

Who knows what the future might look like, I’ve got my ideas, and got my own side projects!

I’m a user of Tableau Desktop, a product by Tableau Software – it’s a great versatile tool for visual analytics, from getting a quick feeling of data trends right through to versatile summaries, and complex graphs. It’s always had a catch though, the pricepoint. [$999 or $1800].

It’s been used to produce some pieces of analysis on this blog, and I use it regularly for work. What’s great is that alongside their latest commercial release, is that they unveiled Tableau Public. This is a free version, that allows you to download the software, create your analysis and deploy it to their web servers.

You can then grab the embed code, and display visualisations on your blog; which people can then interact with. This platform takes it one step further than just a static image. It’s on par with IBM ManyEyes, but doesn’t use java and, to me at least, is much easier and intuitive to use.

The product has the same feature set as the commercial version, with the only limitations being a 100,000 row limit and restricted data sources.

So for those who have chastised me for using ‘expensive’ software before, don’t worry – you can have a go with one of the latest challengers on the block, as according to Gartner.

P.S. There is an obvious lack of a Tableau Public embedded chart in this post, that is because it does not support the Apple platform. Damn. Instead, here is one they produced:

« Older Entries

Newer Entries »