Fizz

=[|Fizz]= Randy Landicho

Overview


Fizz, created by [|Bloom], visualizes status updates from Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. After authenticating an account, Fizz generates a small, brightly coloured circle for each of the status updates, and a large, dark circle that groups the smaller circles by user. The size of the update circle reflects how long the update is. Small circles indicate small updates, and large circles indicate long updates. When the user clicks on a circle, Fizz displays the update in a grey box above the circles.



A search bar at the bottom allows the user to type in a search term. Fizz highlights every status update containing the term with a yellow stroke around the circle. The "Search" button doesn't actually do anything - Fizz highlights circles as the user types.



The user can click and drag circles to move them around the screen and knock the other circles out of place. All the circles will always slowly float back to the middle of the window though. It's mainly for fun; moving around circles doesn't serve any purpose. A user could try to order circles in some fashion, but the constant floating back towards the middle can make this task harder than necessary.

Neither Bloom's website nor Fizz's introduction screen describe a specific audience, but a Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn user who wants to see their network's activity at a glance should find it interesting.

Strengths
This visualization doesn't try to do much beyond display how often people have update their social networks recently, but it does a decent job of it. After inputting a Twitter account, for example, the user can see who has tweeted several times within the past few hours just by looking at it and hovering the cursor over circles to see usernames. If Fizz's only goal is to represent the number of updates from the users of a social network, it succeeds with visualizing that data.

Fizz also succeeds with making the visualization aesthetically pleasing and fun. As suggested by the name, Fizz looks bubbly and bright. Status updates from each user share a similar colour palette. Being able to knock the circles into disarray and watch them drift back into the centre is a nice touch.

Improvements
One feature that would improve the experience is being able to pick a time frame. Fizz displays about 200 of the latest status updates. Depending on how large the network is and how often users update, Fizz will display anywhere from an hour to several months worth of status updates. Being able to pick a time frame (e.g. 6 hours-7 hours ago or 5 pm - 6 pm) could provide interesting insights as to who updates when.

Another feature that would improve user experience is displaying usernames without having to hover over circles. When the mouse isn't hovering over anything, Fizz only displays circles, with no indication of whose status updates belong to who. If Bloom added a way to see usernames for every circle, or at least for the larger circles, the user would more easily be able to compare people. This feature would go well with the ability to zoom, especially since 200 updates only fill up a small portion of a maximized window.

There are also opportunities for Bloom to extend the visualization. Even though Bloom describes their work as "data visualization meets game design", there isn't much to play around with. It would be fun to play around with different views, especially if they offer insights that the circle view could not. It would be interesting to see Fizz link conversations together or link people who are conversing.



At the time of this writing, there's a technical problem with links to tweets. The script doesn't generate the correct link; there's a ///status/// missing in between the username and the tweet number. Links within tweets and links to usernames work fine. A related annoyance is that each tweet link opens in the same tab by default, meaning that the visualization has to reload unless the user opens a new tab for the tweet.

Conclusion
Fizz works well for what it does, but the user experience needs a bit of work and there are plenty of opportunities for Bloom to make it useful. Right now, it's a fun tool to mess around with for a minute. The ability to choose different time frames to grab a different data set, and the ability to choose different views to visualize the data differently would make Fizz more valuable. With updates to Fizz, the user would be able to find out who tweets when and to whom.