TweetFuel is an Arduino-controlled experiment that uses the Nike+ FuelBand to measure the health of our Twitter account.
This is something I meant to write about a long time ago. I also wanted to write a detailed and smart post about how and why the project came about, what it’s meant to say about Stinkdigital, how we had to get Nike onboard because we do a lot of work for them, maybe share some details about how and why we simplified the site design to make it feel less like a ‘product’ launch, how we used HTML5/JS, Arduino, Python, and the coverage we got in FWA, FastCo Create, FastCo Design, and lots of other magazines and blogs.
But time has passed, it’s was launched almost 3 months ago now…. so all you really need to know is that we got it from concept to working prototype in 5 days.
Whenever someone follows, RTs or mentions @stinkdigital, our custom made motorized kit spins a mounted Nike+ FuelBand.
So far the video has had 24,100 plays — and I’m still super happy with it as a piece of work.
The annual social clean-up is in progress. I’ve already shut down my Posterous and Tumblr accounts to focus on my blog. Now it’s time to deal with Twitter.
I love Twitter. It covers such an incredible spectrum of information; but recently it’s begun to feel out of control. The signal-to-noise was wrong and stuff from people I cared about was being drowned out.
I started by unfollowing a few heavy/active users. But I enjoy a lot of the stuff they share so it didn’t feel massively practical. Then @sermad suggested I made more of lists. I created a few and moved a bunch of people over.
Great! But my timeline was still too noisy.
I tried unfollowing a few more people but couldn’t create a clear mental criteria in my head.
Take my friends and ex-colleagues at glue as an example. I don’t want 180+ people on my timeline, but once you start to add a few, you’re into a strange mental world of… If I add X, I should add Y, because we did X together. In the end I was trying to do something ridiculous like:
People I worked with for more than 4 years + that I regulary went out for beers with + that use Twitter regularly + but not so much that they drown everyone else out = Following.
It wasn’t working. I got frustrated.
So I went BIG and unfollowed everybody.
WOOHOO!!
It might’ve been a bit impulsive but it’s democratic and I can slowly add people back over time.
I have a nagging doubt though. It’s counter intuitive. Lists guarantee I see peoples stuff; but they think I’ve unfollowed them. Not great really. But I needed to wrestle control back of the timeline so I’ve taken the plunge.
You may have heard classic tunes recreated on barely functional pieces of electronics before, but this is a really impressive effort.
All made using:
a. HP Scanjet 3P, Adaptec SCSI card and a computer powered by Ubuntu v9.10 OS as the Vocals. (hey, the scanner is old)
b. Atari 800XL with an EiCO Oscilloscope as the Organ
c. Texas instrument Ti-99/4A with a Tektronix Oscilloscope as the Guitar
d. Hard-drive powered by a PiC16F84A microcontroller as the bass drum and cymbal
WEBGL Twitter visualisation + real life holographic installation data eye candy goodness.
The goal of CNN’s Ecosphere [cnn-ecosphere.com] by Minivegas and Stinkdigital is a real-time Twitter visualization that aims to reveal how the online discussion is evolving around the topic of climate change. More specifically, the visualization aggregates all Twitter messages on the topic of #cop17 (in case you wonder, this is an abbreviation for “The 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)”.
The online visualization consists of an interactive 3D globe, described as a “lush digital ecosystem” that closely resembles the look and behavior of real plants and trees in nature. In practice, the virtual plants in the 3D Ecosphere grow from those tweets that are tagged with #COP17. Each tweet about climate change feeds into a plant representing that specific topic or discussion, causing it to grow a little more.
The result thus becomes an mesmerizing, real-time visual representation of how the world “sees” climate change (try clicking on one of the tweet messages), or… an interactive Tron-like Lindenmayer forest, whatever you fancy the most.
Vinyl will always hold a special place in my heart. So it’s nice to see people doing interesting things with the magic plates.
Linyl
Linyl are discs of light drawn from photos of past experiences that can be played on a special record player to create an ambience. They are inspired by our nostalgia for a time when the experience of music was slower and more environmental.
Analogue Vinyl Sampling
Experimental analog sampling with modified vinyls. Sectors from a vinyl record are cut and replaced by pieces with exact shape from other records. When played in a vinyl player the needle follows the grooves from both sectors creating sampled tunes or loops.
