From the get-go, the makers of Twitter knew that the website’s data would be too big to process, organize, and condense into digestible comprehensive information. So early on, they decided to adopt hashtags in order to categorize tweets quickly. Now when you tweet, it is organized into topics, and any topics with tons of tweets are obvious trends. Simple.
Tweetping does something else with Twitter’s information though. Instead of categorizing tweets, it shows Twitter for what it truly is: a cacophony of online shouting, connected by a single website. Made by Franck Ernewein, Tweetping is a map that shows tweets appearing in real time as a small glowing light showing where the tweet was posted from.
The first screenshot is from when I first opened up Tweetping, and within the first 30 seconds or so there were already 124 tweets made worldwide.
The second screenshot is a cumulative of all the tweets that occurred over the course of the 4 hours I left the window open. That’s 436,538 tweets in four hours.
While the range of information that can be gleaned from Tweetping is limited, beyond seeing how much each continent tweets compared to one another, it’s incredibly interesting to look at. One can see how different regions and continents interact with Twitter, as well as getting a true sense of how the social networking tool is actually being used. Hashtags are shown at the bottom of the continent’s data box at the bottom of the screen, showing current trends in a blink of an eye.
The way this data is being analyzed holds loads of potential for further analysis. It would definitely take longer to process the data, but Ernewein could possibly add a feature to find the most retweeted tweets, or most linked URLs, in order to allow more diverse and pinpoint-able information. Of course, maybe his intentions weren’t meant to inform, just to mesmerize with the sheer amount of Tweets, and consequently thoughts, that people have all over the world funneled from just one website. These suggestions are all easier said than done, as every analysis takes time, and all of the time spent analyzing pulls us further and further out of real time results. It’s still interesting to think that there’s a huge database out there of everyone’s thoughts in 140 character or less, and that you can see it all in live time with Tweetping.
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