TwitterGalaXy

TwitterGalaXy is an old-school stand-alone application.  TwitterGalaXy uses the ActiveGalaXy control to visualize Tweets from the messaging service Twitter in 2 dimensions.  The entire search syntax provided by Twitter is available to the user.  If desired, the full text of conversations that intersect with the search terms can be included in the results.  Data sets can be saved to XML and reloaded or merged for later analysis.  You do not need to have a Twitter account to use this application.

Two viewing modes are available: vocabulary vs vocabulary and vocabulary vs time.  The vocabulary vs time mode can help uncover the ebb and flow of themes.

A TwitterGalaXy search on 1 Oct 08 using the keywords Palin and Biden generated this screen shot. In this case the resulting visualization was made easier to view in a smaller, non-maximized window with the zoom and pan features.

Refer to the ActiveGalaXy control page for shots of just the control.

TwitterGalaxy is for Windows.  You must have Microsoft .Net 2.0 or better and Internet Explorer 5.5 or better installed (most computers will have this but you can check to see).  Due to processing needs, a computer made in the last three years is prefered.  All development was done in Windows XP.

You are free to use TwitterGalaXy for any reason.  Because of the rapid rates at which TwitterGalaXy and the Twitter service are evolving, the current version will expire in less than 6 months.  At that time you are free to return and download the latest version.

This application makes certain assumptions on the formatting of data obtained from search.twitter.com.  Any change in that formatting may cause the application loose some utility.

The TwitterGalaXy download is a self-extracting zip file which contains three main files; the TwitterGalaXy executable, the ActiveGalaXy control, a stopwords file.

The Beta version of TwitterGalaXy is now ready for download.
TwitterGalaXy is no longer being distributed. A follow-on program, GalaXyReader will be available in time. If this creates a problem send a note using the Feedback link at the bottom.

If you are a Vista user the installation should complete (after fighting through the Vista permissions dialog boxes) however, some runtime capabilities are missing.  Twitter can be searched and the graphics will appear but any attempt to view individual messages will fail.