# Social media wars: Measuring the battle lines

[As previously posted](https://hawksey.info/blog/2011/07/social-media-and-metrics-what-ive-got-and-how-i-use-it/) I was at the UKOLN [Metrics and Social Web Services: Quantitative Evidence for their Use and Impact](http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/eim-2011-07/) event on Monday. Before attending this event I thought I had a reasonably understanding of social media metrics but I left realising there was a lot I didn’t know, but with new ideas to help rebuild my understanding (and things I might be able to make to help others).

One of the reasons I was keen to squeeze this event in as one of my last RSC engagements was I knew there were going to be people I wanted to finally meet after being a long time follower and others who I wanted to meet again.

During the event I fired up my [Google Spreadsheet Tweet archiver](http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.org.uk/mashe/twitteralyticsv2/) and was collecting [\#ukolneim tweets](https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqGkLMU9sHmLdGVKT2E3M0JrR01rdnZPaVhrNWNTU2c&hl=en_GB#gid=72) (I saw [107962914038670635598](https://plus.google.com/107962914038670635598) aka Alan Cann dipping in to Google+ and he made an interesting observation about G+’s inability to aggregate posts around a tag – I would link to it but Google Plus also doesn’t appear to have a search facility yet - oops).

One of the reasons for capturing the tweets was to use [my ported version of Tony Hirst’s Friendviz](https://hawksey.info/blog/2011/06/friendviz/) to help see the hashtag community. When I generated this I noticed that some well connected tweeters were orphaned or lacking in connections (eg look at lonely old Martin Weller top right):

[![image](https://hawksey.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/image_thumb1.png "image")](https://hawksey.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/image2.png)

Fortunately Tony was on hand to quiz and he quickly saw that the Google Social Graph results included a number of `http://twitter.com/account/redirect_by_id?` rather than `http://twitter.com/ausername` which are parsed to make the node connections. So is the Social Graph API another example of a Google service missing out on data Twitter, just as [Google recently lost real time search with the twitstream](http://mashable.com/2011/07/04/google-realtime-search-suspended/)? Are we going to see more examples of the big social media players put up defences in preparation to a social media war?

Who knows, but spotting an opportunity to get the monopoly on protovis/friendviz hashtag community diagrams I flexed by Google Spreadsheet/Twitter API muscles and turned the redirect\_by\_id’s back into Twitter usernames. Now Martin Weller is looking less lonely:

[![image](https://hawksey.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/image_thumb2.png "image")](https://hawksey.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/image3.png)

Or if you aren’t an Internet Explorer user here’s the interactive version ([the embed code is here](https://gist.github.com/1080398)):

Here’s [a copy of the new code](https://gist.github.com/1080389) which handles the requests to the Twitter API for username lookups.