I was doing some tests on the Ubigraph dynamic graph visualization tool and I have this idea to use the Ubigraph tool to render 3D graphs of Twitter friends on real-time. Follows the video of the scripting utility I’ve created, it starts with a red node of your twitter and when you click, it shows your friends, when you click on your friends, it shows their friends, and so on. I think it is interesting those social network graphs, when I got more time I’ll put more ideas on the pratice =)

Update (26/02): download here the script source-code.

To use it, you must install python-twitter, use the easy_install:

easy_install python-twitter

I’ve tested with Python 2.5, but it should works on 2.4 and 2.6 too.

Start the Ubigraph visualization server and run the script. The syntax for the script is like this:

python twitter3d.py -u username

You can get a help using: