Twitter and the Map

The microblogging site Twitter has emerged from a nice service to one to the biggest players for social networks. With only 140 employees and an estimated revenue of $400,000 in Q3 2009 the Californian company is on rank 12 of the most visited websites all over the world.

The people behind twitter have realized very early that location plays a critical role in their business idea and focused on this topic from the very beginning. In August 2009 there was a post on the official Twitter blog entitled: Location, Location, Location. (Compare the three L’s statement of Michael Goodchild)

In this post developers introduced their work with location and announced an API support for location, which should make Twitter truly location-aware. The API is simple but effective, so that it is possible to add latitude and longitude to any tweet. Developers of mobile applications and even desktop or browser applications can benefit from the API and integrate location on the fly. In particular for mobile applications Twitter and location is a very powerful combination. Not long after the announcement of the location API clients integrates location and now it is an integrated part of Twitter. People now can search and read tweets not only by a period of time but also by their location. For example you can follow all tweets in your neighborhood or city.

Disaster events like the Haiti or Chile earthquake showed the distribution of tweets written from the effected areas. Following mashups shows the benefit of location for twitter in a practical manner. One is based on Google Maps the other was done with ESRI ArcGIS Server and their Flex API:

Trendmaps

If you’re a regular Twitter user, you know about Twitter Trending Topics. It’s that list of keywords that appears in the right hand column of the Twitter homepage. It’s a global system that gauges the thoughts of all of Twitter’s users. These trends are on a global scale and therefore limited for local trends. But most people are only interested in these local trends and what to know what Twitter users in the neighborhood care about. This issue is addressed by  Trendsmap, a new mash-up of Twitter and  Google Maps. Showing Twitter trend on a local scale and on the map. This new service, created by the people behind RetailMeNot. For example you can see what Twitter users are talking about in Vienna, New York, London, San Francisco, Japan, Canada or the state of California. Clicking on any of the trends will bring up information on the volume of tweets for that word, a description of the trend (via What The Trend), and relevant multimedia and links.

Fluttr

A different Mashup is called Fluttr, the social media mapper. It is based on the ESRI ArcGIS Flex API and shows real-time tweets on the map. The map is re-centered to the latest tweet. You can choose your desired map extend and radius where you want to get your tweets. It is an very interactive experience reading tweets on the map.