Impure [impure.com] is a new visual programming language aimed to gather, process and visualize information. Developed by Bestiario, a Spanish information design start-up, Impure aims to bridge the link between 'non-programmers' and data visualization by linking information to programmatic operators, controls and visualization methods through a new visual and modular interface.
Impure allows the user to gather information from different sources, ranging from user-specific data to popular online feeds, such as from social media, real-time financial information, news or search queries. This data can then be combined in meaningful ways using built-in interactive visualizations for exploration and analysis.
How is it different:: Impure offers a highly visual interface for the task of creating visualizations -- which is not as common as one might expect. It has a sleek user interface and numerous modules, including quite a few APIs that are designed to pull data from the Web. It features numerous visualization types that are searchable by keywords like numeric, tables, nodes, geometry and map. And although it saves your work spaces to the Web, you can copy and save the code behind your work spaces locally, so you can back up your work or maintain your own libraries of code snippets.
Source of Data
The two APIs (Twitter Search and Backtweets) can be used to extract tweets and their links. Tweets are extracted using the Twitter Search API in conjunction with Import-feed. This allows Twitter search results to be extracted into a spreadsheet format.
Links are extracted using the Backtweets API in conjunction with ImportXML. The Backtweets API allows you to find any links posted on Twitter even if they’ve been shortened using services like bit.ly or tinyurl.
Business Value
We are planning to study responses in social media (like Twitter, Facebook, etc.) in relation to any event or piece of news originating from any part of the world. For example the tsunami, that wreaked havoc in Asia, generated responses in social media across the world which will be different in each nation based on geography(like distance from the affected area). This way social media data can be used to analyze how people respond to an event occurring in any part of the world.
In the economic sense, companies need to know continuously how their product is being viewed qualitatively and quantitatively in the social media. Thus this application can be used to know the success of their product launch in a specific part of the world. They can also judge whether the cultural and behavioral aspects of a nation is fertile enough for their product to grow further. They can also analyze where their products have a more chance of rejection because of criticism by “innovators segment” of customers in early product life.
