PieSpy 0.4.0

PieSpy is an IRC bot that monitors a set of IRC channels. It uses a simple set of heuristic methods to infer relationships between pairs of users. These inferrences allow PieSpy to build a mathematical model of a social network for any channel. These social networks can be drawn and used to create animations of evolving social networks.
PieSpy has also been used to visualize Shakespearean social networks.This page got slashdotted on 11 March 2004, with the site getting 250,000 hits per hour. Thanks to Notnet for making sure it all stayed alive!
PieSpy was presented at the Information Visualization conference (IV04) in July 2004. Read the full paper online. It has also appeared in Computer Weekly, ct magazine, and I was interviewed live on BBC Radio Kent.
Enhancements:
- Now tracks nickname changes. Generates images five times faster. Removes formatting and colors from messages. The source code has been refactored to make it easy to add new InferenceHeuristics, which are used to work out who is talking to whom - if you create any good ones, let me know! The config file lets you apply different weightings to each InferenceHeuristic.