daydreaming

I visualized some of the twitter data I collected just before the election, coloring mentions of Obama blue. I particularly enjoy the cities pulsing awake and asleep. But you should take a look yourself, try the HD version as it is much cleaner.

Microsoft’s Arc Mouse is gorgeous. The idea is quite cool as well - a folding portable mouse. Usability of course is the real question.

I hate having to build authentication structure, it creates extra code for me to write and it causes extra fuss for users in terms of the forms they have to fill out. Centralized authentication systems have long promised to get rid of this hassle. One notable examples which was never widely adopted was Microsoft’s passport. Such centralized systems allowed a system to authenticate it’s users against a central data store. To many consumers of authentication technologies having a centralized point of failure, both in terms of reliability and security was unacceptable. Especially when that centralized point of failure was Microsoft, hence Passport’s narrow adoption. Microsoft has now built a new system called Windows Live ID addressing some of Passport’s isssues.

In contrast to these centralized systems, OpenID allows a system to authenticate it’s users against any other system. I will leave an explanation of the key exchange to other sites here and here who do it much better than me. The one complexity left with the OpenID specification is that you need to remember or record an arbitrary url, which you must enter on the site you want to authenticate with. For users, this is as bad as them having to remember a password, except that the URL need not be kept secret.

The solution to this complexity comes from Clickpass. They have created a one-button graphical widget which lets users authenticate against Facebook, Google and Yahoo or any OpenID provider. The developer just has to implement a simple interface and is good to go. More importantly, the user’s experience improves dramatically since they now only have to login once with their authentication provider instead of over and over again at each site they go while repetively typing in a complex URL. So what’s not to like? Clickpass makes life easier for the developer and the user has a better experience.

Here are some visualizations of Obama Twitter activity spreading across the country during and after the election. The visuals track mentions of him and can loosely be thought of as tracking “buzz”. Twitter background activity is gold and Obama is blue. Done with ruby-processing.

Lately I’ve been visualizing data from the Twitter public timeline using ruby-processing. Here are some maps of the twittersphere, each one is made from several thousand randomly sampled tweets from a particular day….I hope you find them both beautiful and enlightening.