
Tweetmap - Animated maps of real-time tweets using contiguous cartograms - robhawkes
http://tweetmap.it
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mtrimpe
Amazing work! I really love seeing the 'explosions' when some news happens in
the Netherlands and Switzerland yesterday.

One thing I'm curious about though is if you could make it so that you see the
time per time zone. I'm assuming the replay is SF time, but it's hard to
figure out when exactly those flash events happened in European countries.

All in all, great work.

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robhawkes
We collect the data in the UK (GMT) but the time given in the visualising is
the local time of the user. We have a GMT offset on the homepage but not on
the player, we'll fix that for v2. Hopefully that clears it up.

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choult
What service are you using to collect the data? The public Twitter API or
another aggregation service?

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robhawkes
We use the public Twitter Streaming API, yes :)

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diziet
Some comments: Countries are not homogeneous entities, though! Seeing Alaska
surge if the east coast is tweeting isn't a as accurate. It would also be nice
to have a slider to control time to look at the data from the past.

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robhawkes
Thanks for the comments, we'll bear them in mind for v2!

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dendory
Not to rain on this but I prefer tweetping.net from last week, although it
seems not to be working for me right now. Similar concept, but showed tweets
as tiny lights across the world.

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robhawkes
Tweetping is great too, though very different – much like
<http://onemilliontweetmap.com>

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oriste
It's a pity the size of a country does not represent the absolute volume of
tweets emanating from that country. I understand it would distort the map
completely, but it would make it so much more interesting to watch. Something
like this, but animated in real time:
<http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=336>

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eltaco
Check out Tweetpleth if you want more specific tweets
<http://tweetpleth.herokuapp.com/> like for the superbowl
<http://i.imgur.com/bzmmJno.png>

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robhawkes
Very nice, we actually considered using choropleth maps !

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oriste
Seeing Indonesia bulge like that confirms my own observations of the previous
years. Nice to see that. What I have difficulty in believing is the sheer size
of Russia's volume, that seems a bit out of place. Rob? Otherwise, fantastic
job!

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robhawkes
Seeing the smaller countries bulge is very interest. What is out of place
about Russia? It's a big place and needs to make up for the vacuum left by
China and India.

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oriste
Granted it's a big place, but if the size on the map is a representation of
the volume of tweets, it appears as if 143Mio Russians have a higher volume
than 600Mio Europeans (in more or less the same time zones). I had assumed
that with internet penetration for Russia estimated at 60Mio (± same as
Germany alone), it would not beat the combined internet users of the EU
countries. I could be wrong though, just curious.

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robhawkes
In this case, you're likely right but the effect is offset by the lack of
tweets and huge vacuum in the areas below Russia. The geometry is preserved as
much as possible so the vacuum will pull Russia (which at least has some
tweets) down to fill.

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oriste
Aha. So you're saying we can't compare e.g. the tweet volumes of the UK or
France with Russia based on the size of the country as depicted on your map?
BTW Canada and Greenland seem out of proportion as well. But regardless, I've
been hooked on this map since I found out about it this morning. Fascinating.

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robhawkes
Effectively, yes. Just because a country is bigger / smaller than another
doesn't mean that you can draw immediate conclusions about the relationship
between those countries. A bloated country basically means that it's sending
proportionately more global tweets than it's geographic area would suggest.

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aviswanathan
Sometimes I wonder if Twitter itself has internal tools to measure/visualize
things like this. Kudos, the project looks great!

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robhawkes
Thank you! I've been to Twitter and hadn't noticed it but would love to see it
there ;)

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bruceboughton
I'm really suprised by Indonesia's bulging size relative to its landmass. It's
far larger than other tourist resorts like Thailand.

Any ideas?

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yesbabyyes
According to HN user pax, in the Tweetping thread:

 _Indonesia has 4th biggest population in the world. Also, 6th most active
country on Twitter (2010)._

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5137438>

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bruceboughton
Thanks, I did not realise this.

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edwinvdgraaf
Very nice work. The trending topics per country would also be informative when
shown, but that may be personal.

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wreckimnaked
nice work!

one minor suggestion: I couldn't find any reference to the timezone used to
collect/display the data, therefore I was unable to have any deeper insight
from your awesome visualization. Could you make that information clear on the
visualization or the info page? ;)

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robhawkes
We collect the data in the UK (GMT) but the time given in the visualising is
the local time of the user. We have a GMT offset on the homepage but not on
the player, we'll fix that for v2. Hopefully that clears it up.

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decad
Great work, Noticed this says beta does that mean there is a lot more to come?

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robhawkes
Oh yes. We want to see how v1 goes down first but yes, much more planned on
top on refining what we already have. Things like visualising hashtags /
search terms.

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eksith
Who needs acid when when you can trip on JS and Twitter? ;)

Really nice work!

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robhawkes
Haha, exactly. Thanks!

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nhoizey
Really nice, congrats!

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robhawkes
Thanks!

