Twitter Maps – A Unique View of London

As we mentioned in a our previous posts on the real time visualisation of Twitters – Twitter is intriguing, part social network, part text message, part location aware it almost redefines communication in its purest sense. Limited to 140 characters and based around a simple text box – a text box, asking “What are you doing?” it is difficult to understand at first..

The realtime visualisation of Twitter is an interesting visualisation – but in terms of the city then Twitter Maps lets you get down to street level to view people posting their ‘Tweets’ (that’s Twitter language for messages). The screengrab below is the Twitter Map zoomed into London and there are a surprising number of people Twittering this morning:

Twitters are simply about what people are doing – for example in the image above Redmedicine posted ‘Finishing breakfast, mopping up a leaky cappuccino and staring down the barrel of another wonderful day. But the sky is blue!’ Simple yet addictive and by linking it to a mapping interface it provides a unique visualisation about what people are doing in the city right now.

Twitter is tipped to be the next important social network on the web, indeed CNN Money state that ‘the free service, which combines the instant voyeurism of personal blogs with the brevity of text messages, appears to be catching fire, doubling its user base every month. It had 10,000 users by December and expects to hit 100,000 by April. Users post pithy updates on their lives (in no more than 160 characters) via the website, their IM clients, or their mobile devices. These posts can be sent just to their circle of friends or, if the user allows it, they can be added to Twitter’s public time line. (A free desktop widget called Twidget also features the updates.)

You can join our Twitter network and take part in the emerging Twitter phenomoenon. At the moment on our side bar to the right are our current Tweets, once we get a network in place we will be able to display other peoples Tweets, which would be an intriguing insight into the readers of Digital Urban.

We will be posting more applications for Twitter networks over the coming weeks.