Twitter is an important source of information for millions of people, and it has also become one of the top communication channels that we use at Mozilla to engage with our community.  The Firefox Twitter account is growing faster than ever before, and a search on the #firefox hashtag alone will summon a lively stream of tweets from around the globe.  But that’s only a thin slice of all the action taking place.  To really appreciate the scale and scope of Firefox activity within the Twitter universe, you need to analyze the data through an entirely different lens.
To achieve this, I’m working on creating a Twitter visualization that captures the unique and multi-dimentional nature of our community, their conversations, and the energy that flows through their tweets.  As you know, there are some incredibly complex and mesmerizing data visualizations out there… my goal is to create a similarly stunning Twitter visualization that is also built on open web technology.  As Morgamic kindly put it, we’d like to make this a “crazy utilization of the open web”.
I’m personally really excited about this project… we’re always looking for new tools to engage with our users and to celebrate our community, and I think a cool visualization of our Twitter activity will help encourage that.  But to take this to the next level and kick-start the ideation process, I need your help.
How would you like to see our Twitter community visualized?  What kinds of information or data types would you want to capture?  To help guide your thinking and provide some inspiration, I’ve collected a set of the most creative Twitter visualizations from around the web.  I also distilled these down to what I thought were key elements that made for a great visualization, and therefore required specs for what our visualization should be:
* Approachable: Captures meaningful data that’s relatively easy to digest by just about anyone.
* Beautiful: Presents the information through an artistic lens, and is generous in its use of color.
* Dynamic: Displays activity in real-time, conveying a constant state of movement through animated elements.
* Interactive: Allows users to play with design elements, and filter/search through the data with relevant tags.
* Unique: Takes inspiration from, but does not closely mimic, what has already been created.
With all that in mind, I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, and ideas around a potential design concept for our Twitter visualization.  Please leave a comment and share your thoughts.  I’m looking forward to hearing from you!