Where Tweets Collide

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About a week ago, Sascha Pohflepp of Plugimi and Karsten Schmidt of Post Spectacular launched their Social Collider. Part of Google’s Chrome Experiments, this new open-source online tool promises to “catch the Zeitgeist at work.”

The Social Collider is a visually appealing mapping system that tracks conversations on Twitter both temporally and laterally across different threads and data trails. Pohflepp and Schmidt claim that it searches and reveals what is happening on Twitter in the same way a particle collider visualizes subatomic matter. Considering the much-scorned 140-character limit for tweets, the subatomic metaphor seems quite apt.

Labeled a “metaphorical instrument” by its designers, this interactive tool might just let us see what people are actually talking about in that curiously mysterious realm: the Internet. Users can search Twitter by user name, theme or phrase. When they do, it instantly creates a javascript visualization that tracks the linkages between tweets across a defined period of time. The visual representation of these links, which is created with curly lines that stretch across distinct data points, certainly looks more like a piece of art than a scientific graph. But in practice, it is both of those things.

Users of the Social Collider have started posting their screenshots on flickr, and the creators are already blogging about the possibility of programming a similar functionality to track conversations on del.icio.us and flickr. These types of developments could provide for all sorts of interesting insights about the intersections of words and images on the Internet.