As part of my research for my thesis and other security related implications, I decided to create a program to create a graph of different type of degrees of relationships in twitter. As of now I only being able to grasp a small amount of the total research but so far so good. So I decided to share some of the first graphs and some of my problems.

1. The first graph worth talking about is, The friends of my friends. As shown below the graph is nice, but it does not show any interesting data, besides the fact that almost all share friends in common that I do not have in my list.

2. When I decided to move to higher degrees the application was able to retrieve the data but the library (graphviz) was unable to generate a jpg or png. In the case of a SVG I was able to create the file but, neither Linux nor Linux64 nor OSX where able to load the image. When I tried to generate a png or jpg the gd or the application gave me a core dump. Thanks Juan, for lending me your Linux64 computation time .


3. I decided to try with GraphML format instead of the graphviz’s dot format. It is worth noting that the degree 2 graph were generated much faster, but again we run into trouble when rendering the huge load of node and edges when I came down to 3 or more degrees. This time was not a matter of not being able to render the images but instead the program I was using Yed, I guess is using an algorithm that does not take into account the fact that I want to see something instead of a huge ball of edges and nodes .

4. Again more problems, but this time with the application not handling the loads. Now I decided I was a good time to redesign the application for more scalability and this is what I’m doing so far. So I will post the code as soon as I have that.
Cheers and hopefully someone likes or can use this post for something. Ohh.. and this is not finished by far hopefully from here a lot of thing will be created and some new functions will be added to the app. And of course all this is written in RUBY !