New York Times Project Cascade
The New York times R&D team created a tool for understanding how information is spread over social media: specifically, New York Times articles on twitter and what is trending. The app has two different modes: story mode and cascade mode. The cascade mode has three viewing options in which the user can choose to look at the sharing of networks, one over time and another as threads of conversations. The graph is represented as 3D nodes that you can move around. This tool is useful to the New York times by being helpful in answering the questions: “What is the impact of a tweet?”, “Are certain people more influential in certain topics?”, “How does the content of a tweet impact the conversation around it?”, “How does the time of day impact effect of tweet?”. Times is looking to use this program to figure out how to use this to expand impact in conversations around news.
The findings of this app have been that people who are followed by famous people have the most impact in what articles get shared the most. The most followed people don’t actually get a lot of retweets. These are the people that are like bridges between clusters and the weak links who bring in information.
source: http://www.creativeapplications.net/processing/cascades-processing/