Watching Our Twitter World - twittervision Redux

Posted by Nathan / Jul 28, 2008 to Featured, FlowingData Projects, Mapping, Software / 6 comments

Watching Our Twitter World - twittervision Redux

I've always liked twittervision. I'm not sure what it is, but it's strangely mesmerizing, getting a tiny peak into others' lives. This weekend, I recreated twittervision with a little bit of style for good measure. Say hello to Twitter World.

The Data

Twitter World shows updates from the Twitter public timeline, and makes use of the twittervision API for location. Until I get whitelisted for the Twitter API, I'm polling Twitter and twittervision every six minutes to keep things fresh. Hopefully neither putters out.

The Implementation

Like my visualization showing the spread of Walmart, I used Modest Maps (+ OpenStreetMap) to map things out, and I used TweenFilterLite to animate. I had all the gears in place and everything working nicely a couple of hours in - but that was with a flat XML file. The hard part was feeding the thing live data and then making sure everything was synchronized. That took, um, too much time.

In any case, not bad for a weekend project.

PS. Don't forget to follow me on Twitter :)

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Comments

  • Andrew Pratley
    Jul 28, 2008, 9:33 am

    Nathan,

    This is great stuff. I see another citing in Forbes!

    Andrew

  • Nathan
    Jul 28, 2008, 9:55 am

    ha! somehow i doubt that

  • Edward
    Jul 30, 2008, 5:06 pm

    Just can’t get myself to use twitter… fear it’s going to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back of info overload in my life.

  • Nathan
    Jul 30, 2008, 6:43 pm

    Edward - think of it as background noise. like having the tv on when you’re not really watching.

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