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after adding people search and the ability to import friends directly from your gmail address book, twitter has launched a new section on their site called explore. this section will be dedicated to tools created by the twitter team as well as fan creations, that help you interact with the site and explore what’s going on.

the first exploration tool to be launched by twitter (which has been created by stamen design, the team responsible for the digg visualization tools) is twitter blocks. as with many of samen’s designs, twitter blocks is pretty to look at, but it’s not immediately intuitive to understand.

twitter blocks is ‘an abstract way to navigate your twitter neighborhood or block,’ the neighborhood or block being the community of your friends, your followers, and the people you are following. looking at the picture below, the blue blocks represent tweets from yourself, and the line of orange blocks running through the neighborhood represents your friends and their height represents how long ago they tweeted (higher means older):

clicking on a user’s avatar takes you to that particular tweet (status message at that point):

from here you can also load that user’s neighborhood and explore what’s going on there. clicking ‘zoom out’ will take you back to your main explore page. where you can see grey lines protruding from both sides of the orange blocks. these lines represents tweets from users following, or the users followed by, the orange blocks that are your friend.

twitter blocks is an interesting way to explore your twitter neighborhood, and while some users will find themselves spending some time with the tool, others will inevitably wonder if this is the best use of the twitter team’s time and resources.

Technorati Tags: twitter, micro-blogging, stamen design, visualization, explore, twitter blocks