Fixes
- Twitter Authorization: We've finally laid to rest some really pesky issues. For very good reasons, Twitter wants to make sure that we use their authorization screen, which means that we need to deal with the inevitable changes that happen on their end. Still, there is nothing worse that getting a bunch of traffic to your site only to discover that your software doesn't actually work because something in the external environment has changed between the time you built and tested it and when it was deployed. OAuth is not the easiest technology to deal with, but it ensures that users have the last word when it comes to their accounts.
- UI Freezes: I also think we've crushed the main issues with synchronization, aka "the dreaded spinning ball of eternity". Butterflyzer is doing some pretty bleeding edge stuff with EMF and Zest visualization updating. An important part of the overall design has been to grab information in parallel so that while one process is waiting for a request to be serviced by a REST or another query somewhere, we're busy collecting all of the information we can from other sources. If you try it out I think you'll be impressed with just how much information you can suck down in a very short time -- we're using a lot of straws! So, we can have dozens of separate processes running at once, and they're all updating a live EMF model editor and Zest view, while the user is also interacting with the model! That's a perfect recipe for concurrency issues -- especially since according to Ed Merks, EMF isn't actually intended to be thread safe -- and while things have gone surprisingly well, we've had our share. When the UI locks up, that has a definite impact on quality perception! The way we've handled this is not with a lot of thread blocking and synchronization calls. In my experience, that's a recipe for endless hacking. Instead, my strategy has been to treat the visualization in a very fail friendly way, while focussing on protecting the model from anything that happens in the UI. The last set of issues were due to the way EEF was handling updating. They couldn't have anticipated our usage and it was very easy to override the default behavior by swapping in a custom base component.
- Other stuff: A lot of little glitches and annoyances have been taken care of. If you have some 'favorites' that you'd like looked at, now is the time to start letting us know.
- Unresolved: The Google Insights, Exhibit and Timeline stuff is still really brittle. There are a bunch of time-consuming issues to resolve for that to work seamlessly.
Now on to the fun part...
What's New?
- Graph Visualization: Many improvements here. Some are subtle, but others dramatically change the feel and functionality, I think for the better. For example, grouped items are now all placed into a big text block. This improves performance and readability. There is still a lot of experimentation to do and as you can see below, we'll be giving you more and more control over how the visualization is done. If you've got feedback on any of this, please send a note.
- Performance: Lot's of little things, especially in how large searches are handled add up to a more fluid experience. The "full Butterflyzer" -- Google Search, Twitter Tweet and Author Search and term processing, Topsy statistics and trackbacks and Semantic enrichment of 60-100 separate web pages -- is finished in just a couple of minutes, with the key results available right away. By the time you are interested in the more complex stuff, it's already there. For comparison, when I first started experimental implementation of the tool that could take as long as 45 minutes. And if you tried to do all of this manually, you'd be at it for weeks.
- UI Polish: A lot of little improvements. There are still rough edges, but we're making significant progress. As one simple example, things are now put in a sensible order in the tree editor. Moving items among collections works better now too.
- Graph Customization: I saved the best for last. Perhaps you thought the Butterflyzer graph colors and design were hard to read or just plain ugly. Well, now you can customize all of that to your hearts content! Just click on the "Butteflyzer:Preferences" menu item, and navigate to the Visualization page:
So that's what's been happening in Butterflyzer land. If you're using Butterflyzer, I want to ask one important favor. Please fill out the Butterflyzer survey. I know people are using the software, we have the downloads and site visits to prove it! But we've only had a couple of survey responses. Those have already been helpful in identifying key issues. For one thing, it's convinced me that the number one thing I need to do is to help people understand what makes Butterflyzer more than just a fun tool to play around with. I need to show people how it can be really useful in their day to day work, and that's what I'm going to be working on next. In the meantime, I'd love to hear from you about what you're done with Butterflyzer. If you have visualizations or interesting data sets you've collected with it send them to me at miles @ [our domain name].
I'm going to drop another plug in here. We've gained a lot of experience at this whole social media analysis thing, and I think we have some unique capabilities to offer, including consulting and custom development. In addition to our expertise in Social Network analysis, computational modeling, visualization and artificial reasoning, our colleagues have literally written the books on genetic algorithms and other optimization techniques. If they can't figure it out, it's not likely that anyone else can. So if you or someone you know have really challenging problems, and you'd like to get out ahead of what everyone else is doing, please drop me a line at the above address.
And don't forget the survey..!
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