Twitter does visualizations: useful bird-themed eye candy

Twitter's just launched a new portion of their service called Explore. It's essentially a "labs" section, and home to a handful of old (and new) tools to integrate and browse Twitter. The newest addition, called "Blocks," is a 3-D visualization of your friends and followers, and what amounts to a 3-D social graph of Twitter buddies. The tool loads up with a neat popping effect that looks like little rooftops, and similar to the neat startup video on the Apple TV. Each one is actually a message. Mousing over it will show you who wrote it, along with who wrote any surrounding messages. Clicking on it zooms you down to see what it says. One you're there, you can quickly navigate from message to message using your keyboard's arrow keys.

The visualizations were done by Stamen Design, the same group that created some neat flash tools to track activity on Digg, and Trulia's Hindsight--which launched earlier this year.

Check out your Twitter contacts, and their contacts all on the same page.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Browse from message to message by using the arrow keys on your keyboard.

(Credit: CNET Networks)