Cate used a number of different visualizations to understand the interaction of conference participants at the Eclipse Summit Europe on Twitter. Some of the things I found really interesting are:

• The distribution of Twitter clients and usage of mobile clients. Somebody created an iPhone app for ESE. This may have impacted the use of iPhones. More iPhones than Blackberries or Android phones.
• I really liked the idea of getting a description of the conference themes from the users’ profiles. In this way we can get a good understanding of what topics are discussed at the conference. The tweets themselves prove less revealing (top tags like ESE and RT don’t tell me a lot about the conference). Wordle also proves really useful to give us the gist of the profiles.
• The Twitter API provides a lot of additional information that is not included on the Twitter website itself, such as the location of participants (what other information?).

A lot of other interesting information can be gleaned from the tweets:

• Most active tweeters (with the expected power law distribution)
• Location of the conference participants
• Number of clients used by the users (one user used 5 different devices)
• Language used to communicate (mostly English)
• Date conference participants joined Twitter
• Plot of number of followers over number following

Looking forward to a visualization of the conversations between conference participants.

• Google’s move into social media (from Google’s blog) and Google taking on Facebook and Twitter (Buzz)
• Flickr co-founder returns to roots by launching an online game (Glitch)

Google’s moves are a good example of countermoves (Google’s response to Facebook’s newly announced webmail product, code-named Titan) as described in Ferrier’s framework on competitive agressiveness.

One interesting play will be the integration with other services such as GMail, Google Maps, and their mobile versions in the case of Buzz. Which side will be in a better position to leverage their existing user base?