Take That, Google: Interactive Google+ Stream Visualizer Launching as Chrome Extension
[ Visualizations of five hours of posts, comments and likes on Google+ condensed into four minutes. ]
It's official. There is a more visually engaging version of Google+'s Ripple on the web, in LAUNCH's opinion. Former Google intern Justin Ormont recently introduced us to the G+ StreamVisualizer, which he created before the launch of the Ripple, and plans to release it as a Chrome extension next week.
While Google+ Ripples lets you see activity as it unfolds, The StreamVisualizer, shows both what happens in real-time -- the branches shake whenever someone adds a comment to a post, as they exert a force on the branch -- as well as what has happened.
"The visualization shows the organic, living nature of a social network," Justin tells LAUNCH via email.
The visualizer shows the top 100 people on Google+ along with their profile pictures, and is organized by what people do, such as by occupation. The flowers with several white and blue dots around them are from authors who interact highly with their followers, while the bare flowers identify authors who simply create posts but do not respond to comments.
"The Chrome extension needs some work before its feature set is fully fleshed out, but I'm expecting to keep it minimal in terms of UI," Justin says. "You'll be able to select who to include in the visualization and how far back in time. Then you can watch the growth of those conversations. The beginning iteration of the extension will have a small feature set; I hope to have the live view ready that shows you the grand view of the social network as it happens. It's very zen like to watch as new posts grow as people add to the conversation."
SCREEN SHOTS
Each flower looking object is a post organized by what people do. Each individual dot within that flower represents a comment.
The white dots that extend from individual dots represent a response from the author. Each blue dot represents a +1 from the author.
CONTACTS & LINKS
Justin Ormont, Xoogler
Google+: https://plus.google.com/102219475968800204884/posts