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Please critique my weekend project

whatcrackin.com

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1) What am I looking at? A brief one liner would be nice.

2) Took a while for the first tweet to pop in. A simple "wait" prompt would provide ample user feedback.

3) Color code the pins to the tweets on the left hand side. That would be a simple but effective UI improvement.

All-in-all, nice work for a weekend!

excellent points. thanks!

Looks cool. However I don't see anything in any of the places (no pins and I'm not sure what it is suppose to do)?

So some more info would be appreciated

Yeah. I was kinda hoping people actually used Twitter's geolocation service a bit more than they do and it would just be obvious. Austin is pretty decent today, with the first tweet usually one popping up within a minute.

Agree it could be more descriptive. I got to this point and it was working well so I deployed. (Thats a feature, right?) Any thoughts on how to explain whats happening that wouldn't interfere with the page structure too much?

Maybe a "first time here? Check the FAQ" flash message like the stackoverflow sites?

I had no idea what was going on or meant to happen.

thats a great idea

An "about" would have been cool... but by the time I had realised there wasn't one, I was about to close and a tweet popped up and it was immediately obvious.

Neat site.

I would suggest caching some of the data server side, so there is some previous data on first page load.

Excellent idea, thanks!

Perhaps also add an activity gif in there so everybody knows it's busy (e.g. "Looking for tweets in the area")

It looks cool enough, but I'm a little unclear what it's doing. Mapping your twitter friends? Is there something else here that I'm just not getting?

its posting any geotagged tweet in those cities.

A very closely related / similar idea:

http://austin.vicarious.ly/

node.js + twitter streaming api + comet + google maps

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