It’s simple, but lovely. Web designer Franck Ernewein‘s real-time Twitter visualization, Tweetping, drops a bright pixel at the location of every tweet in the world, starting as soon as you open the page.
The result is a constantly changing image that grows to look like a nighttime satellite shot, bright spots swarming over the most developed areas. But Ernewein has packaged it all in a subtly interactive visualization that avoids distracting the viewer while still imparting a great amount of information.
Meanwhile, a selection of tweets are projected, along with latest hashtags and mentions, all while tracking total tweets, words, and characters. The length of the two gray lines on the display represent the number of characters and words in each tweet.
Though it’s one of the most beautiful, Tweetping is far from the first to display geotagged tweet information; coders have built sites to display election tweets, adjustable parameter maps, and even 3-D visualizations.
Tweetping even represents Antarctica, but not the ISS. And there’s no pause button; like Twitter itself, Tweetping’s data accrues incessantly; there’s no off switch but the back button.
Nathan Hurst is learning how to make some things, knows how to fix some others, and is already pretty good at breaking everything else. He has written for Outside and Wired, traveled in Africa, and tweets as @NathanBHurst.
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The World's Tweets Light Up the Globe in Stunning Live Visualization
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The World's Tweets Light Up the Globe in Stunning Live Visualization
