Hopefully this question isn't too opinion based. If it is, can you point me in the right direction for this question.
I am hoping to create something simple to visualize a twitter network that has been defined with networkx. What are the best available visualization tools for this? I would like to have something along the lines of, I run a script and get display a png or some image of the network that isn't too cluttered. I would definitely like to differentiate between usernames and hashtags and possibly color by community or something along those lines.
I haven't started anything yet other than playing with the built in networkx drawing which is limited and networkx doesn't even recommend. The tools I've found in my search include plot.ly, gephi, d3.js, and cytoscape. Plot.ly is proprietary so I'd like to stay away from it. D3.js seems pretty cool. I plan on using it eventually for some interactive graphs, but I hear there are performance issues and limitations to hundreds of nodes vs thousands of nodes. Also I'm not familiar with javascript at all. Gephi and cytoscape aren't really programmatic. They are nice, but require a human element.
Does anything already exist that meets my needs? Is the human element required to get decent looking output? I can get okay results with the built in networkx drawing, but it requires significant tweaking for each case (remove overlapping, setting up a half decent layout, etc...). Also the fact that networkx mentions they may drop support for drawing in the future doesn't help.
