Twitter Analytics Visualized

Twitter Analytics with Project Cascade

Recently, I came across a article on a special tool which the New York Times R&D lab has created to visualize the cycle of stories in social media. On top of being extremely cool to look at, it provided a very interesting perspective on social media. The tool is called “Project Cascade” and according to NYT the tool allows precise analysis of the structures which underlay sharing activity on the web. As far as I can see the tool analyzes twitter tweets and the distribution of a news story through twitter. Represented by colored squares on a plane of concentric circles representing a timeline, the tool allows a reader to see the velocity the sharing of a story has, the degree of influence certain sharers have on twitter, the degree of impact a story has based on how many times it is shared.

Project Cascade Examples

Have a look at some of these examples of Project cascade visualizations, Really cool.

Project Cascade Clinton
Fed Up Flight Attendant Makes Sliding Exit
Another Pill That Could Cause A Revolution
But Will It Make You Happy?

Insights from Project Cascade

For an online marketer the tool raises some questions. Since this tool illustrates the degree by which a webpage can become popular by tracking the number of links generated from the time the story is first published on the internet, can this activity be repeated without penalty. The answer is naturally yes because this happens every day with thousands of stories on the world wide web.
Another insight is of the types of distribution of links. You have seen on many webpages including this one a method to share the content of the webpage you are on either with a facebook like, or twitter retweet. Well, when looking at the Project Cascade diagram original tweets are represented by a pink color and shortened links are represented by a yellow color. What this implied to me was original tweets with original shortened links held a bit more authority or influence than links with duplicated shorteners or Retweets. What this tells me is I will implement a rule to shorten my own links from now on, to give them a bit more authority as an original link. I will still RT links on twitter, but I will publish original tweets with original shorteners that I can track.

Examine Project Cascade for yourself and see what you can extract from this tool.

What other observations do you see in Project Cascade data?