Twingly Screensaver and Social Networking

As part of my job at Penn State, I've been working on some activities for an honors course in the College of IST. The course revolves around social networking tools, and the section currently in progress is on Blogs and RSS feeds. The last week of this unit discusses the idea of mapping social networks.

In researching the idea of mapping social networks, specifically blogs, I found Twingly screensaver. I downloaded it and have been trying it out. It's a 3D interactive visualization of blog activity across the earth. I like it, because while it is a screensaver, it also allows you to interact with it, much as the screensaver my coworker Bart Pursel has running on his Mac. That one is called NewsStream and it works through RSS feeds, but also can be used as a game similar to Breakout.

In Twingly, you can see feeds of blog postings from around the Earth, while a 3D model of the Earth rotates. Press "i" to interact with it and read short versions of posts, or link to the original blog post. I'm not certain how the app chooses what feeds to show, and some of the content is definitely adult-oriented, but the idea of mapping the where of blogs appeals to me.

The program is in beta right now, but I can think of several extensions that would make it more useful from a social network standpoint. It would be really cool if you choose the feeds you wished to display to start with, and allowed the program to build from other blogs referenced by those feeds. That way, you would be mapping social networking space both geographically and in a way that shows how the network grows organically.

In addition, I could see value in being able to map different networks (by using color, or shape, or whatever) that would allow you to see different social networks and how they may (or may not) intersect, both geographically and network-wise.

Finally, they need to do a Mac version. Really.