Twitter-Based Surf Report Flowchart
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By: Chris Greacen - 03/26/2009
I've been mucking around with Twitter and Facebook lately. There are a few folks who have been using these services to post info about how the surf is. I don't live close to the beach (yet), so I like to see what's happening before I jump into the car and make the trip.I sent a message from my phone this morning. Even though the surf was lame. The message was published all over the place (microsyndication). Here's how it worked:
- I emailed a photo to twitpic.com which...
- updates my status on Twitter which...
- the @StokeReport user follows. If my tweet contains "SMLM", stokereport will publish my tweet on stokereport.com (and even pull the image off twitpic it seems, nice!).
- also, http://greacen.com has that little widgety thing over there on the left. Your browser will pull the image from twitpic and put it onto this page.
- also, Twitter will pass my status update on to Facebook.com
Guess what? Most of these nodes along the way have their own RSS feeds for others (services or people) to slurp & read.
Thinking about this plinko-esque publishing flow is a little dizzying. I've been working on web site flows for a few weeks now. It's often helpful to map out a flow to see what's really going on. Graphviz is an open source tool for producing network diagrams and flow charts that I've been using for mapping high-level flows. Here's what a map looks like for the publishing flow I described earlier:
digraph TwitterSurf {
size="6,6";
ratio = fill;
node [style="rounded,filled,bold" shape="box" fillcolor="skyblue"];
/* Set up specific shapes */
Phone [style="rounded,filled" shape="oval" fillcolor="grey"];
"RSS Aggregators" [style="rounded" shape="box3d"];
/* relationships */
Phone -> "twitpic.com" [label="Email with attachment"];
"twitpic.com" -> "twitter.com" [label="twitter api"];
"twitter.com" -> "facebook.com" [label="facebook/twitter bridge"];
"twitter.com" -> "stokereport.com" [label="if post contains 'SMLM'" style="dotted"] ;
"twitpic.com" -> "greacen.com" [label="widget/embed" color="red"] ;
"twitter.com" -> "RSS Aggregators" [label="rss feed" color="darkorange"] ;
"facebook.com" -> "RSS Aggregators" [label="rss feed" color="darkorange"] ;
"stokereport.com" -> "RSS Aggregators" [label="rss feed" color="darkorange"] ;
}
If you ignore the
[]
s, it looks like a terse version of our list up above. Here's the flowchart those instructions produce:Kinda neat, huh? I find the way this goes from text to sitemap really intriguing.
This -> that; that -> next; other -> next;
makes sense to me. Graphviz does a great job of putting this all together in an easy-to-digest graphic.There are a few rails front ends to graphviz (demo) that might make a web tool for this possible. I could see this becoming a handy planning tool for our organization.
Questions:
- Anyone ever use a tool like this for making sitemaps or high-level flows? What tools work well for modeling these interactions?
- What other publishing tools are you using to propel your tweets? (where's my linkedin hook?)
- Has anyone run into ownership issues with this plink-esque publishing?
- Does this have a name? Let's call it microsyndication.
- What's the best way to get metrics for this kind of publishing? Is there a way to measure in this distributed/microsyndicated system? How many people read my surf report?
Thanks for reading.