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

The problem with starting my new OER Visualisation job 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 (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. 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 ***

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 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
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 but the send it to us 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 😉

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