An interesting interaction I had recently … with Gephi.

I was working on our most recent visualization project a while ago and had some issues. Gephi is a really powerful program and I think it’s really interesting with the potential to do so much, but we all know it isn’t glitch free. After the overview tab appeared in the preview tab within the overview tab, and after zooming out too far meant that I could not zoom back in or save my work, after the files I’d exported continually caused the entire Finder application to ‘unexpectedly quit’, and the spinning rainbow processing cursor soon became more familiar to me than the arrow, the final frustrated force quit of so many, I let out a frustrated tweet suggesting that Gephi was less than optimal, questioning it’s sobriety.

A few hours later, I received this at reply:

Gephi Graph Viz (@Gephi)

@(mytwitterusername) please share your experience on forum.gephi.org to help you identify what’s going wrong.

I woke up to see this after I eventually finished my project, sent it in and went to sleep. At first I was quite startled, because I didn’t know Gephi had a twitter account and I had not used it’s username in my tweet.

But thinking about it now it’s rather fantastic and I should have seen it coming. Of COURSE a program about social networks is officially represented on one of the most popular social networking platforms. Of COURSE they would track the use of their name and why WOULDN’T they direct frustrated users to a forum of crowd sourced information on issues and their resolution? Gephi’s all about social networks.

It sort of shocked me (well, firstly because I had just woken up and this inanimate program that had caused me certain amounts of frustration was replying (politely) to my tweets, but secondly) because I never realised such organizations could so easily reach out to you and reply to your issues personally and successfully. The only real experience I’ve had with troubleshooting with most programs is looking for online tutorials and other peoples’ posts online. (Usually in forums. I couldn’t for the life of me tell you why it didn’t occur to me to try that when I had problems. I don’t get a lot of sleep.) But now I think this is great. I feel like it connects me with the people behind the product a bit more, or at least to people who share my issues and can help me. If I’d seen this tweet before I’d finished the project it would have been helpful and a fitting way finding the solution to my network issues through social networking. I mostly follow actual people on twitter, and a few automated ones with either news headlines or related to blogs I also follow, so I guess I’m a bit behind because I know a lot of other organizations have specialised twitters but I never saw the point. Now I see some of the positive effects they can have and how public contact information can enable positive changes. (if they don’t spam you with @replies and promotions.)