The one million tweet map | Hacker News Reader

The one million tweet map

onemilliontweetmap.com

I have no idea what use this could be to anyone, that being said it was extremely cool to zoom in on my little town and see five tweets going out from people just on the estate I live.

*Edit I've just realised this is a demo show the power of http://v3.maptimize.com/ which is very cool.

Correct, I worked hard on that new version and I thought a lot before finding the idea of that demo to show what you can do with maptimize.

I really like that tweet demo. You can find a lot of interesting information, like tweets in your area as you said.

The heatmap is also interesting when you need to analyze huge amount of data like this.

You can also see where twitter is very active. I was surprised to see that Indonesia is very active.

I was also surprised about the activity in Indonesia. Another spot that caught my eye is halfway between Taipei and Japan. Turns out this is Okinawa which has a large US military base. I had expected much more activity in India.

When I zoom in, so that I can see city names, I find the selection of cities that are shown strange. Large cities seem to be missing outside of the US. For example I wasn't shown neither Rio de Janeiro nor Sao Paulo nor Belo Horizonte but Vitoria was there. In southern Germany there is Augsburg, Ingolstadt and Fuerth, but Munich (the only city with over a million inhabitants) is missing.

Maybe other people does not appreciate your work, but my girlfriend (who study marketing) and me have gained some insight about Twitter users and countries with Internet access [1].

Great work and thank you!

[1] I know this last is arguable: In some countries, Twitter is not the main microblogging service.

You might want to take a look at this for a view on Twitter Demographics:

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/amislove/publications/Twitter-IC...

and this for how one might be able to do "serious" predictions using Twitter as a proxy:

http://www.bgoncalves.com/component/jdownloads/finish/3/39.h...

Very nice and more interesting than the bar charts/graph that other twitter visualization tools give us. It would be really cool (and informative) if you could add a small word cloud when the cursor hovers over a city.

I did a similar non-interactive dataviz a while ago during the big student protests in Quebec this spring. I clustered (using LDA) the tweets talking about the protests and I mapped and identified them.

http://olihb.com/?p=199 (in French, though)

There is quite an intense location on west coast of Africa, a bit below Nigeria that appears to be coming from somewhere in the ocean, just to the west of Sao Tome. Google maps is not showing me anything from that location like an island. Any idea why this might be?

Also useful would be some sort of Distance scale/measure.

Looks like 0 degree latitude, 0 degree longitude. Probably tweets with no location info or bad location info.

That is Null Island

http://www.nullisland.com/

Should be an April 1 entry

This is quite brilliant! Good job.

According to what I saw, there were 2 of the last million tweets from canada, Toronto with 5.5 million people had 0 tweets, this seems highly improbable, perhaps Canada has some sort of privacy laws that prevent their data from showing up?

This map shows only geolocalized tweets. Usually, tweets are geolocalized when they are sent with a mobile.

Also twitter stream don't send 100% of the tweets, it will be to huge. But statically speaking, it should be enough to have a good picture.

May be there are some restrictions in Canada.

This map give us a lot of information about twitter more than the first fun and wow effect. I like that!

Can't see anything. Tested it with Chrome and Safari on OS X but all I see is http://i.imgur.com/V8FZe.png

weird gonna check right now! thanks

Working fine now :)

It happened to me a bit earlier - I think I had to force refresh or something.

could you try again

I fixed it I just removed the IE detection detection. (The demo doesn't support IE 8 and less) Thanks for the report

It would be interesting to aggregate the top similar tweets in these hot areas and show that as a tool tip. No idea how difficult that might be :)

I would love to watch this during some sort of global event, whatever the context. Maybe I'll remember to visit it on Election Day.

That's one big data. Do you have firehose access?

What do you mean? We just display data from twitter stream. You can use their stream if you want to

Which stream are you using exactly. Are you applying any filters? Afaik the complete firehose has restricted access, or did that change?

Edit: very cool visualization btw. What are you using exactly on the backend for stream processing?

I use the public stream with a filter on location (:locations => '-180,-90,180,90') Twitter doesn't seem to have limitation for that.

The backend is written in Ruby. The daemon to index tweets use the great Intridea gem https://github.com/intridea/tweetstream.

The page http://onemilliontweetmap.com/ is simple Sinatra application, and I use REDIS pub/sub to push tweets to the browser.

There's two different HTTP Streaming endpoint for Twitter's stream

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/statuses/sample

Returns a small random sample of all public statuses. The Tweets returned by the default access level are the same, so if two different clients connect to this endpoint, they will see the same Tweets

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/statuses/firehose

Returns all public statuses. Few applications require this level of access. Creative use of a combination of other resources and various access levels can satisfy nearly every application use case.

Very cool. I would suggest revising the scale of the bubbles so that 100 tweets does not have equal representation as 1500 tweets

Really cool visualization - wish it went a step further when you got closer in (trendsmap.com style).

Is there a way to permalink to a specific location/magnification?

not yet, but good remark. I will use history API to update the URL

That would be great! Thanks.

This is pretty cool. Geolocalized data is huge

This blows my mind

A million tweets isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion tweets.

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