A Visualization Interface for Twitter Timeline Activity
Wesley Waldner, Julita Vassileva · 2014
Social media streams are a useful source of current, targeted in-formation, but such a stream can be overwhelming if there are too many sources contributing to it. In order to combat this infor-mation overload problem, rather than by filtering the stream, users may be able to more efficiently consume the most impactful con-tent by way of a visualization that emphasizes more recent, popu-lar, relevant, and interesting updates. Such a visualization system should provide means for user control over stream consumption while not excluding any information sources in the stream, allow-ing users to broaden their source networking without becoming overwhelmed. This paper presents a visualization for the Twitter home timeline that allows users to quickly identify which updates are most likely to be interesting, which updates they have and have not read, and which have been posted most recently. A small-scale pilot study suggests that improvements to the proto-type are required before carrying out a larger-scale experiment. The effects of recommendation presentation on subjective measures of recommender accuracy will be studied as future work using this application as a framework.