Visualizing the Blue Sky Firehose

I unfortunately missed the heyday of the Twitter API, but I'd seen a few posts about Jetstream from Simon Willison and Jake Lazaroff, and wanted to do a quick hack visualization with d3, based on this template visualization.

This was super easy to put together (thanks to the aforementioned blog posts!)

This visualization provides a live stream of hashtag frequency from the moment you connect, but also includes a decay rate so that stale hashtags are removed after a certain period of inactivity.

The value on the bar is the total number of times the hashtag has appeared since connecting to the stream (and the hashtag is hyperlinked to search in Blue Sky. The length of the bar includes the decay rate value. The plot itself is updated every 5 seconds.

(Also it should go without saying, but potential NSFW hashtags will appear. It is the unfiltered internet, after all...)