Twitter Geolocaters

Making Twitter a global experience, visually speaking...

...of totally wasting one's time.

To sway me into blogging more I thought I'd include some reviews. My thoughts on things. You know, to actually get into those topics I'd like to get around blogging about.

So to kick it off, I'll be giving a quick capsule review of two real-time geolocation visualization feeds: TwitterVision and TwittEarth. What is a geolocation feed? Its simply a visualizer that displays the geographic location of something on a screen-sized map of Earth.

TwitterVision

Developed by David Troy using Google Maps API and Twitter's public feed. Its a simple and clean method of displaying new tweets from around the world. It's mainly fun eye-candy for us users, and a great experience for the developer. The service also features a 3D view of Earth for added sugar, but no where as visually stimulating as TwittEarth's 3D, but thats in a minute.

The service provides users with a means to log in using their Twitter username and password, and an extra field for inputing your current location. Your current location can be easily changed by tweeting L: New York, NY or something more specific like L: 30.010,-90.007 or something more basic like L: Work. Macros can be assigned for quick updating L:school=3700 University Blvd, Berkeley, CA 95010, thats a very nice touch.

You can also access some settings to configure what is displayed, such as showing only tweets from friends and followers or posts containing latin or kanji/unicode characters.

Where I think TwitterVision gets interesting is in its filtering, such as localising tweets from a certain region like San Francisco. The sidebar that lists those who've tweeted is a nice touch and helpful when you got friends listed, you get to quickly see their lasted tweet.

But it would be nice if a user could dynamically lock into regions and not be limited by a preset list. I would of liked to be able to center my tweets down to my town, region or province using a clean URL. Something like this:

http://twittervision.com/local/canada/quebec/shawinigan

or lets take San Francisco as another example:

http://twittervision.com/local/usa/california/sanfrancisco

That and be able to post tweets from that locked-down location, since we have the option to post from the global map.

TwittEarth

Mashable defines it best: think of it as TwitterVision on speed. And it is!

Eye-candy at its finest, its a 3D view of Earth with tweets being displayed every 10 seconds. The visuals are very nice and polished compared to TwitterVision's model. Each user is represented by a weird avatar-esque creature that adds to the great visuals. Its designed by Digitas France SA. And thats it.

Seriously. TwittEarth's features end there. No personal settings, no avatar selection, no way to customize your experience, zoom in, zoom out, scroll the globe click on avatars for more info or tweets. All you can do is look at the tweets being added and post your own, which appends the URL to your tweet in your post. Thats it. That is all it can do at the moment. And after a while, the webapp dies on you with a message from Yahoo saying you've queried their server too much for the day.

It is clearly a public beta and an experiment using Yahoo's API combined with Flash (instead of TwitterVision's JavaScript, which I prefer). It doesn't even connect to Twitter's public feed from what I see, it displays what is posted from the webapp's form which allows you (in a second field) to input where you are. it would be interesting if it could pick out your location automatically based on IP address, then I wouldn't need to fill out a second field. Or just do what TwitterVision is doing *wink*wink*

Also, clicking on links should open them in new windows/tabs, because it is sorta annoying loosing the current feed of tweets on the globe.

And well, basically just do what TwitterVision does but with the added snazzy graphics TwittEarth has, it'd be cool. It'd be a ripoff, clearly, (even though it already is) but they'd be going in the right direction anyhow.

The End

In any case, these two webapps are a glimpse at people's lives and locations. An incredible waste of one's time, but a fun few minutes to play with either way you slice it. They have potential I believe, such as TwitterVision's "Local Tweets View" which would provide usefulness to many. We'll hope for it for all those twitterers that actually spend more than 10 minutes with these things :p

04:30 PM