Burak Arikan is an artist and researcher who focuses on creating networked
systems that evolve with the interactions of people and machines. He has
also been previously featured in VC. One of his latest
pieces has been an experiment with the Twitter API, where he tracked the
growth of his Twitter network over a period of 3 weeks. Burak was trying to
understand how connections and particular clusters might expand or contract
over time.The first image is a portrait of Burak's Twitter graph on the
first week of the experiment, when he was following 80 people. Burak only
mapped the interconnections between friends, removing himself from the
picture, and then labeled the 6 main clusters: "MIT", "silicon valley", "web
programming", "generative art", "Istanbul", and "web business tr (Turkey)".
As he explains: "The silicon valley cluster is large and dense compared to
others. The MIT cluster is almost like a clique (every person connected to
every other). Generative art is quite close to Silicon Valley, mostly
bridged through the user neb. Obviously the Turkish web business
cluster has many connections to the Silicon Valley, techcrunch being a major
bridge here. The web programming cluster is very small, surprisingly it is
connected to Silicon Valley only through the user al3x, who works at
Twitter".
To test the importance of key bridging users, Burak decided to
remove them and see if the graph still hold together. Many of these changes
are represented on his map of week 3 (second image) where more bridges and
denser clusters are discernible within his network of 158 people.
Apart
from a careful analysis of some of the patterns emerging in this experiment, which can be further explored in his blog post,
Burak poses an important question worth considering: "Do these people mind
about what these diagrams reveal about their privacy, while all the data is
public?".