Pulse of the Planet is a project of mine to visualize tweets in real-time on a map. It’s powered by Google’s App Engine (Python) and uses the Twitter Search API and Google’s Maps (v3) and Geocoder API.
Pulse of the Planet in action.
Besides looking cool, Pulse offers a way to visualize local trends and how many people talk about different subjects. As of this writing, Pulse is searching for tweets with the word ‘snow’ and plotting it on the map. What’s cool is the high concentration of tweets coming from the northeast (especially DC) because of the impending snow storm. Additionally, if a tweet also contains ‘ski’, a skier icon is displayed, and a snowboarder icon is used for tweets that mention ‘board’.
In the future, I’ll update the search terms Pulse uses to correspond to the Olympics and other talked about events. I’m also working on a feature to let people map the search terms of their choice, and I’m working on a few infrastructure pieces so that I’ll stay within my free resource quota on App Engine. What would be awesome is if I could get access to the Twitter’s public timeline which would allow me to plot everyone’s public tweets on a map, which would really demonstrate how Twitter is the pulse of the planet.
