A fully interactive environment that visualizes in realtime the communities and conversations across Twitter

GOAL

Twitter Aurora is a powerful data visualizer that surfaces the communities and conversations happening on the Twitter platform in realtime. 

The interactive tool helps Twitter better understand users’ habits, patterns, and insights through unique data modules such as geolocation, interest maps, propagation, and trends over time.

PROCESS

From branding, to experience architecture, to prototyping, we partnered with internal Twitter teams and stakeholders to design and develop the Aurora experience over a span of 2 years.

Twitter Aurora was developed and housed at Twitter's headquarters in NYC and San Francisco, while Story Mode exports of current events and trends are displayed in offices around the world.

LIVE MAP

Twitter Aurora is fundamentally a live map of Twitter. It presents—in both macro and micro views—conversations on the platform, and provides new ways to discover insights and trends among a wide range of communities. It visualizes Twitter from a new perspective—reshaping a complex data system into more human, relatable narratives.

GEO MODE

Geo mode maps Twitter activity over a representation of our world. Tweets, retweets, and comments animate across the map as discussions evolve in realtime. Navigate over trending topics, or zoom into specific countries to understand common threads and unique phenomena from both macro and micro states.

INTEREST MODE

The Interest mode groups users into communities based on commonalities. These clusters create an organizing structure that becomes a new lens into understanding the Twitter community.

Related clusters are grouped together in 1 of 5 “continents”: News & Politics, Entertainment, Music, Sports, and Technology. For example, the K-Pop cluster is found in the Music continent. Within clusters, a user’s proximity to another user is calculated based on common followers, while a user’s follower count dictates their altitude.

CREDITS

Creative Director: Jonathan Kim. Technical Director: Andrew Bell. Head of Production: Allison Keiley. Head of R&D: Robert Hodgin. Associate Creative Director: Alvin Groen. Design & Motion: Jonathan Kim, Robert Hodgin, Alvin Groen, Joyce N. Ho, Sekani Solomon, Scott Balles.