A quick Twitter experiment, mostly to get a handle on the JSON structure and the Twitter API.

The little white dot that's wandering around is the mouse pointer. The large blue circles are people taken from my personal timeline, with any circle with mulitple little circling white dots showing multiple tweets by any single persons. The size of the blue circles indicates follower count, with the distance of the circle from the centre being a rough indicator of time since it was tweeted.

The main reason I wanted to make was to explore all the little metrics you don't get to see via the usual twitter interface - follower count, an indicator of relative time. Also, I just wanted to fool around.

I used the Traer physics and NextText libraries to do some of the text stuff. I'm not particulary settled on using it as it's not greatly documented but it was worth fiddling with. Total development time is about half a snow day, with a few nights just to play.

Conclusion: It's ugly and needs some refinement with regards to what metrics are displayed and how. I'd like to make displaying a tweet remove it from being displayed. The more I watch the text scroll from the middle the more I know that's going to be the first thing to change. We'll see. It's still just a toy.