This is the start of some exploratory visualizations of live emoji use on twitter.
It is built against the (very cool!) emojitracker streaming api by Matthew Rothenberg that, among many other things, collects data on uses of emojis via twitter's streaming api.
Much of the internals of interacting with the api, and basic design of the modals, are built starting from the emojitracker code as well.
The emojis will blink based on the current tweets including them.
The initial order is based on the current all-time rankings returned by the emojitracker rankings endpoint. After that, the ranks will be updated every 10 seconds or so based on subsequent tweet activity since you came to the site.
This first test uses an Archimedean spiral, with (d3.js-based) animations when the rankings are updated.
Some more details are in this blog post.
B.F. Lyon
Do Dizzy
Toggle Ferris