There is a shortcut: Press Q + click. Pressing Q turns on query mode for one click. I only included it that in the mouseover tooltips, fearing abuse. The server seems to handle it well, so query away.
For Github you have to enter the username. For Stackoverflow you have to enter the numerical userid which can be found in the url of your profile page.
The Github API rate limiting made it impossible to keep up with the user/repository growth so I stopped in March 2012. Only users that were public at the date of the crawl, and are part of the largest connected component of the network will be shown.
I am the designer of Ekisto. Questions and feedback are welcome :)
Hey! Firstly, good to see some Romanian software news that's not linked to organized crime. I love your country! I was lucky enough to cycle around it for a month a few years ago and really loved the place.
Random suggestion: mapping a user metric such as dominant programming language to inform the building style. So maybe shell code would be more oldschool (Chinese/Japanese/Korean style wooden pagoda type look), perl would be hacky (like lashings of bamboo), enterprisey languages would be shiny skyscraper windows, and obscure stuff would be mud brick or straw bale or something!
The spatial proximity domain seems a little wasted with this mapping .. perhaps it could be improved by using direct links informed by real clones/contributions.
For my thesis I had some similar ideas, but they were more abstract, sculpture-like. The user volume was a cylinder, with varying radii (mapped to activity) at different heights (time). The mappings you are talking about are very subjective, but it's good brainstorming. Refining and iterating over such ideas, brings innovation.
You are spot on that Github has very rich relationships of collaboration and sharing that are not all expressed by the data I chose. I wrote a longer post about my goals and motivation with Ekisto that addresses that concern:
http://processq.tumblr.com/post/69098066993/ekisto-design
I also write about future work which will improve the current version. I think some tagging functionality either precomputed or user-contributed will help a lot of newcomers understand the map better. Stackoverflow veterans immediately recognize the clusters and the avatars.
I think it's a really well done visualisation. Perhaps you could improve it by making it easier to select a user and see their data. For example, instead of having to click on the query tool, then clicking on the user, then clicking on the link to their profile, you could just click on their profile picture and get a little box showing their top stats. Minor quibble though, great work!
Yes, great feedback. StackOverflow does something similar, it displays a badge on mouse over a user link. Very helpful for seeing the top tags where the user posts.
Thank you! Silly me only read the instructions for the stackoverflow data and assumed it was the same. This does explain why I couldn't find myself. I had assumed I jsut wasn't important enough to show up.
