# Bye-bye Protovis Twitter Community Visualizer: Hello D3 Twitter Community Visualizer with EDGESExplorer Gadget

[![](https://hawksey.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/image2-300x181.png "image.png")](https://hawksey.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/image2.png)The problem with starting my [new OER Visualisation job](https://hawksey.info/blog/category/ooh-er/) is I’ve got less time to explorer my own little projects. This may be a blessing for some of my readers as it means I can do less waffling. So in brief: [Tony came up with this brilliant solution for plotting twitter hashtag community graphs](http://blog.ouseful.info/2011/04/12/using-protovis-to-visualise-connections-between-people-tweeting-a-particular-term/) (it was brilliant because it used Google Social Graph API to get friend/follower relationships, no authentication required). Then I came along and [dumped his code into Google Spreadsheet and wrapped the output in an embeddable gadget](https://hawksey.info/blog/2011/06/friendviz/). Google then launched Google Plus which appears to coincide with a deterioration in friend/follower information in Social Graph (one presumes my social network is better than yours type posturing). So now here’s a new version of my spreadsheet which plays nice with Twitter and uses API authentication to get friend follower information: **\*\*\*** [**D3 Twitter Community Visualizer**](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqGkLMU9sHmLdEZ1WXczU05Lam5ESzgzMGFncWREM3c#gid=2) **\*\*\***

The big news probably isn’t the spreadsheet (yawn), but how the data,shown below if your RSS reader hasn’t stripped it, is rendered. It was achieved by wrapping a version of my [EDGESExplorer tool](https://hawksey.info/blog/2011/11/edgesexplorer-simple-force-layout-diagrams-from-edge-lists-stored-in-google-spreadsheets-nodexl-gephi/) in a Google Gadget. This means if you’ve got any Google Spreadsheet with two columns of edge data (target/source) you can insert this gadget, display the data and embed elsewhere (if your host allows <script> inserts). To use the gadget in other Google Spreadsheets select Insert > Gadget > Custom then enter the url [http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/108150762089462716664/edgeexplorer.xml](http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/108150762089462716664/edgeexplorer.xml "http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/108150762089462716664/edgeexplorer.xml")One thing to bear in mind in the gadget is unverified. The main impact of this is if you ‘Publish to the web’ or ‘File > Share’ viewers won’t see anything (but as can seen above publish embed works). I’ve tried to [get the gadget verified](https://support.google.com/docs/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=160111) but the [send it to us](http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/submitgadget.html) link is broken (I’ve logged it as an issue so hopefully it will be fixed soon). I have a job to go to in the morning so I’m going to let you ask/tell me it doesn’t work using the comments ;)