Engineers Swarm to Twitter
Twitter Code Swarm from Ben Sandofsky on Vimeo.
This video, produced by a Twitter engineer, Ben Sandofsky, and posted on the Twitter developer blog, uses an interesting technology called Code Swarm to visualize the explosive growth of Twitter as a development platform. Code Swarm represents developers as icons and files as dots that change color and brightness. As a developer adds, or "commits" code to a development project, the dot changes color and magnetizes towards that developer creating a different hive of activity.
The ethereal video documents the period from April 2006 to January 2010 and illustrates the amazing amount of work it takes to build something as seemingly simple as a website that lets you publish 140 character status updates.
The behavior of consumers in and around social networks has often been labeled "swarm intelligence" or "hive mentality" by cultural anthropologists because it mirrors how communities of ants and honeybees act as a group. Apparently, engineers aren't that different from the average consumer when it comes to following the crowd.
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