Tweetping, a Twitter map

February 2, 2013 8:19 PM

Tweetping – astounding real-time visualization of tweets around the world. The fascinating tracker is the work of Paris-based developer Franck Ernewein, who launched the site several days ago. Via.
posted by nickyskye (25 comments total)

I love this shit! Thank you!
posted by Chutzler at 8:43 PM on February 2, 2013

This is our previous generation's science fiction. And it's here.
posted by davebush at 9:11 PM on February 2, 2013

I really want to do this with an arduino, a giant map, and a bunch of LEDs behind it. Have been drawing up plans for ages now, but mostly it's just daydreams so far.
posted by lollusc at 9:14 PM on February 2, 2013 [3 favorites]

neat.
posted by Golden Eternity at 9:17 PM on February 2, 2013 [1 favorite]

Reminds me of the supposedly real time display of searches web crawler had back in the day. This would be even better if you could set it to display tweets in a readable manner even if that meant only displaying every 100th tweet. Especially if you could geographically restrict the tweets served.
posted by Mitheral at 10:03 PM on February 2, 2013 [1 favorite]

Where tweets are not happening is almost as interesting as where they are. It's like you can watch the Great Firewall and Digital Divide in real-time.

Also, the glyphs of the Matrix had nothing on this.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 10:19 PM on February 2, 2013

So here's a dumb question. I worked on a very small project using the twitter API to retrieve and display tweets with a specific hashtag and was only allowed to hit their server like once every five seconds. What kind of permissions do you need to get in order to get a real-time world-wide feed like this guy is using??

Also, this is rad.
posted by quadog at 10:56 PM on February 2, 2013 [1 favorite]

I’m surprised at the number of tweets. I would have guessed a lot more.
Something in the nature of 1000’s of tweets a second. Is this actually all the tweets?
posted by quazichimp at 11:02 PM on February 2, 2013

So here's a dumb question. I worked on a very small project using the twitter API to retrieve and display tweets with a specific hashtag and was only allowed to hit their server like once every five seconds. What kind of permissions do you need to get in order to get a real-time world-wide feed like this guy is using??

He's almost certainly using Twitter's streaming API, most likely the sample stream which is a very small percentage of all tweets.

I’m surprised at the number of tweets. I would have guessed a lot more.
Something in the nature of 1000’s of tweets a second. Is this actually all the tweets?

See the above.
posted by Dr. Eigenvariable at 11:30 PM on February 2, 2013 [6 favorites]

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
posted by not_on_display at 12:02 AM on February 3, 2013 [2 favorites]

Mesmerizing. I also appreciate their using of the Plate Carrée projection, but it'd have been even better if they'd just used the Waterman Butterfly. Also, hello, where's Antarctica's tweets?
posted by empyrean at 12:41 AM on February 3, 2013

So many tweets from Indonesia, so few from India. I didn't expect that.

Very cool.
posted by Caconym at 3:26 AM on February 3, 2013

Is this actually all the tweets?

No, it can only be a tiny sample
posted by memebake at 3:57 AM on February 3, 2013

Thank you Dr. Eigenvariable .

One would think that India and South Korea would be tweeting like crazy as well.
but they are not?...what is this about?
posted by quazichimp at 4:37 AM on February 3, 2013

Is this actually all the tweets?

Twitter says 500 million tweets a day.

500,000,000 / 24 hours /3600 seconds per hour = an average 5800 per second. Wow, that's a lot more than I expected.
posted by jjj606 at 5:22 AM on February 3, 2013 [2 favorites]

One would think that India and South Korea would be tweeting like crazy as well.
but they are not?...what is this about?

Possibly time of day - maybe they're asleep? I left this running the other morning and watched as people woke up like a wave from the (United States) east coast to the west coast. Fascinating.
posted by sidereal at 5:59 AM on February 3, 2013

What kind of permissions do you need to get in order to get a real-time world-wide feed like this guy is using??

You just need cash. Datasift are one company that let you set up filters against the full firehose and just consume the bit you're interested in. Kinda pricey, though. I wouldn't bother for a hobby/art/make project.
posted by Leon at 7:18 AM on February 3, 2013

The Twitter streaming API is free for anyone to use for an experiment like this. There's various limits at the free level, mostly that you only get a subset of all tweets. But the way the subsetting works if you are creative with filters you can get a fairly large fraction of all public tweets that match a narrow criterion you're interested in. If you want absolutely everything you have to pay (and handle a data rate of something like 10-100 megabit), but many projects don't need everything.

Tweetping is very pretty, I particularly like the way he's building up the heatmap. I think the blue-on-black color scheme appeals to folks who grew up with digital surveillance movies. This screen fits right in to Minority Report, Enemy of the State, or Bourne Identity.
posted by Nelson at 7:57 AM on February 3, 2013 [1 favorite]

Is there something about Australia where they don't use Twitter? I know it's 5a there, but it's 3a (on Monday morning) in Tokyo and there are WAY more tweets in Japan than Australia.
posted by OHSnap at 10:14 AM on February 3, 2013

It looks as if Australia isn't captured - mouse over the "Asia" section and the highlghted box doesn't include Australia.

Never mind - there are a few tweets showing up for me now in Australia and NZ. Australians don't tweet much?
posted by skyscraper at 10:36 AM on February 3, 2013

You don't need any cash, just a twitter account and a network connection. Anybody can watch the "filter" stream and receive nearly all the geotagged tweets, which represent maybe 1% of all the tweets. It currently yields about 3.5 million a day, so about 40 per second.

It is an amazing time that we live in, when we can know so much detail, all over the world, about where people spend their time, and I thank Twitter for making this knowledge available to the public instead of keeping it all for themselves.
posted by enf at 10:54 AM on February 3, 2013 [1 favorite]

I remember in 2007 I was asked to do a presentation to university and college co-op coordinators about how to use social media to communicate with students.

At this time Facebook had just been opened up to the wider world, and Twitter had just been started up.

I showed a room full of sensible, fairly conservative folks a Google Maps application that showed Twitter posts happening in real time all over the world. No one could understand how such a service could be useful - "people making posts about what they had for breakfast???"

People thought the seminar was a waste of time.

Ha ha.
posted by KokuRyu at 11:18 AM on February 3, 2013 [1 favorite]

I wrote up a short guide to the streaming API with Python a few months ago. It’s a surprisingly simple dataset to use.
posted by migurski at 5:06 PM on February 3, 2013 [4 favorites]

@Mitheral: About the WebCrawler's real-time display of searches. Yeah, that was real, and it picked out only a tiny fraction of the searches. I wrote it as an alternative to a simple click-per-query on the PC speaker of our little stack of 133 Mhz Micron PC "servers" which was too annoying. I sort of recall writing code to offer a version of the stream that "censored" the most repetitive searches, and that "girl.gif" was the top search. Now, at Google, a lot of the lobbies (at least the ones in Mountain View) project a real-time stream of queries for a bit of entertainment while you wait. (I had nothing to do with that.)

A readable, representative stream on this display would be nice too.
posted by Hello Dad, I'm in Jail at 1:33 AM on February 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

im surprised he gets so much geoloc info -- i recall reading that less than 2% of tweets were geocoded. has something changed? is twitter now localicing IPs?
posted by 3mendo at 6:00 AM on February 5, 2013