information aesthetics.
A compelling animated map visualization that focuses on revealing interesting data hidden in a social network information stream, here the travel information gathered from people's public Twitter streams by searching for the term 'Just landed in...'.
The idea is relatively simple: a Processing application finds those tweets that contain this particular phrase, parses out the mentioned location the people just landed in, along with the home location that has been listed on their Twitter profile. With this information, the individual travel itineraries are then mapped out as 3D curves placed on a flat world map.
Watch the video below, or read more relevant information at 's blog.
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Time and Date follows Time Zone (Brussels)
What strikes me most about this is how few non-USA initiated trips there are. Twitter, I suppose, is solely an American phenomenon. Or is that wrong?
Outside USA Twitter is not so popular; here in Italy for example all uses Facebook. But also consider that this project analized English text string and lot of users write on Twitter non-English sentences.
That's just mind bottling.
get lit,
Matt Swisher
http://www.12Vspotlight.com
As Paolo mentioned, only looking for "just landed" really limits the software to english speakers. Adding equivalent phrases for other large languages (Mandarin, Persian, German, French, etc) would probably greatly increase the amount of data available for analysis.
how does it know where the person came from. I understand "I just landed in New York" - and New York gets a hit... but how does it know where the slight path originated from?
maybe it's just that the phrase 'just landed in' is something only americans would use? ;-)
us brits would go for something much more ambiguous, vague and non-helpful for clever internet search bots! amazing visualisation though
@Tor: in the paragraph below the picture it states: "...along with the home location that has been listed on their Twitter profile." Start with home location and map to their "just landed" location. Pretty simple actually. Not totally accurate, but gets the point across.