Book Image

Social Data Visualization with HTML5 and JavaScript

By : Simon Timms
Book Image

Social Data Visualization with HTML5 and JavaScript

By: Simon Timms

Overview of this book

<p>The increasing adoption of HTML5 opens up a new world of JavaScript-powered visualizations. By harnessing the power of scalable vector graphics (SVGs), you can present even complex data to your users in an easy-to-understand format and improve the user experience by freeing users from the burden of tabular data.</p> <p>Social Data Visualization with HTML5 and JavaScript teaches you how to leverage HTML5 techniques through JavaScript to build visualizations. It also helps to clear up how the often complicated OAuth protocol works to help you unlock a universe of social media data from sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.</p> <p>Social Data Visualization with HTML5 and JavaScript provides you with an introduction to creating an accessible view into the massive amounts of data available in social networks. Developers with some JavaScript experience and a desire to move past creating boring charts and tables will find this book a perfect fit. You will learn how to make use of powerful JavaScript libraries to become not just a programmer, but a data artist.</p> <p>By using OAuth, which is helpfully demystified in one of the book’s chapters, you will be able to unlock the universe of social media data. Through visualizations, you will also tease out trends and relationships which would normally be lost in the noise.</p>
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Authenticating


Much of the query API is available without authenticating. However, if you want private information about users or want to write to the site, then you'll need to authenticate. There is also a much higher request limit for authenticated applications. Without authenticating, a single IP address is limited to 300 requests a day. With an authenticated application, this limit is raised to 10,000 requests.

Tip

Rate limits

Many social media sites use rate limits in their APIs. These limits are in place to prevent you from overloading the site, and also to save you from asking for too much data. Twitter processes more than 4,000 tweets a second. Without very special preparation, your infrastructure would quickly be overwhelmed if you were to process them all.

Again, this is a site that makes use of OAuth to authorize users. However, they make use of OAuth 2.0, which is much easier than the OAuth 1.0a we used in the previous chapter. We'll limit ourselves to making use of public information...