German Designer, Stefan Wagner has created a visualisation ‘creature’ which appears to be something close to the very last word in how we might inhale the freshest and broadest picture of our presence on social media.
Currently in beta version, Sociotope is the type of tool which may pack novelty value but could end up delivering so much more for Wagner, rather like the probing yet seemingly casual tentacles of the pet he has designed.
At a functional level, Sociotope allows you to see all of your activity on social media denoted by length and thickness of the tentacles as a three dimensional graph which can be manipulated and rotated to allow you to understand the data which you have been pouring into Twitter and Facebook, and organise by time, class and author with an evolution slider to allow you to see the build up of data over time.
To build the application, Wagner used Three.js for 3d visualisation, Moment.js for date display, GetImageData, Colour Thief which is a very cool tool allowing you to grab colour from an image, JQuery and require.js.
It is not even early days for the Sociotope project yet but with so many aggregation applications on the web, Wagner could have the jump here at looking at activity from a visualisation perspective which puts a jetpack on timelines and Twitter feeds, something which most people don’t have the time or inclination to go back over.
