NOTE: Post-acquisition, Twitter started making life difficult for applications like Treeverse that access twitter data. Since I don’t have time to play cat-and-mouse games with a hostile platform, I'm retiring Treeverse. The codebase of Treeverse dates back to a bookmarklet I wrote in 2014. It’s been a pleasure to see something started as a curiosity project picked up by the OSINT and archivist communities. Thanks to everyone who shared their enthusiasm over the years.

Treeverse

Treeverse is a tool for visualizing and navigating Twitter conversation threads.

It is available as a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox.

Installation

Chrome Users:

Firefox Users:

Introduction

After installing Treeverse for your browser, open Twitter and click on the tweet that you would like to visualize the conversation of (or try this one.)

If you’re using Chrome, the icon for Treeverse should turn from grey to blue in your browser. Click it to enter Treeverse.

If you're using Firefox, the icon will be hidden until you open a tweet, and then it will appear in the address bar.

Exploring the Conversation

Conversations are visualized as a tree. Each box is an individual tweet, and an line between two boxes indicates that the lower one is a reply to the upper one. The color of the line indicates the time duration between the two tweets (red is faster, blue is slower.)

As you hover over nodes, the reply-chain preceeding that tweet appears on the right-side pane. By clicking a node, you can freeze the UI on that tweet in order to interact with the right-side pane. By clicking anywhere in the tree window, you can un-freeze the tweet and return to the normal hover behavior.

Some tweets will appear with a red circle with white ellipses inside them, either overlayed on them or as a separate node. This means that there are more replies to that tweet that haven't been loaded. Double-clicking a node will load additional replies to that tweet.

Privacy

Treeverse runs entirely in your browser. No data is collected or tracked by Treeverse directly when you use or install it. Browser extension installs may be tracked by Google and Mozilla, and the data requests made to Twitter may be tracked by Twitter.

When you create a sharable link, the data is sent to a server so that it can be made available to other users. Access to the shared link server may be tracked to prevent abuse.

Additionally, when Treeverse runs it loads a font hosted by Google Fonts (https://fonts.google.com/). Google may track this download.

Bugs & Contact

Tweet @paulgb or report on GitHub.

Credits

Icon created by Eli Schiff.

Treeverse would not be possible without the excellent d3.js. Styling is powered by Semantic UI.