Heatmap of Twitter knowledge by location (heatmap.js + Google Maps)

http://www.inboxq.com/location

by drpancake • 15 years ago

35 25 15 years ago

IanDrake2• 15 years ago

Neat, but on just about every topic there's a huge bias towards California, North East Coast, and England (because those are tech hubs?).

eloisius• 15 years ago

Agreed. This would be way cooler if it took total tweet density into consideration so that it wasn't always London, NY and LA.

answerly5• 15 years ago

Definitely something we've considered for a future enhancement. Our summer intern worked on this map over the last few days and we wanted to release it before he headed back to the UK later this week.

commanda• 15 years ago

There also seems to be a contingent of knowledgeable Twitter users in a boat off the west coast of Africa. (I'm kidding - this is due to tweets where lat,lon = (0,0))

SkyMarshal• 15 years ago

The Nigerian scammers are migrating to Twitter, and have taken up seasteading to avoid the authorities.

city41• 15 years ago

Try sports teams. "Broncos" creates a huge hot spot over Denver. They are a good way to validate the data/app generally works.

morsch• 15 years ago

Tried a few German sports teams. "Schalke" was a huge hot spot over London... huh.

clay• 15 years ago

except the Jesus topic, because of all the godless heathens in SF and NYC

jmjerlecki• 15 years ago

It would be great to do something like this for an election. A heatmap for people who voted #red or #blue. Seems like a lot of neat uses for this.

gojomo• 15 years ago

Nice idea, but no queries I could think of yielded any surprises, and almost every topic was dominated by the media capitals of NY, LA, and London.

Apparently, also, there is no expertise worth plotting anywhere in Asia or even Australia.

It was more fun to type in diseases and pretend the overlay was a map of contagion. EG: [swine flu]... There's a massive outbreak 1500 miles west of the Galapagos!

AlexC04• 15 years ago

I hunted around for a few things like "node.js", "Php", "True Blood", "Harry Potter", etc... they all fit within the same pattern you noted. (with minor, or not-unexpected variances)

My favorite was "Maple Syrup"

rorrr• 15 years ago

You need to normalize the results by population density.

Pretty much anything I type, I get the same results - NY + LA + SF + London.

Rabidgremlin• 15 years ago

Might be nice if the map didn't hide part of the world (Australia, New Zealand etc)

skeletonjelly3• 15 years ago

Sad to see that Australia didn't make the cut :(

It looks like they're fetching a static image from Google Maps and using a jQuery library to do the heatmap (which uses canvas). Not sure why they made it that way. Would have been a perfect fit if they fetched a rectangular map and got moved that text on the right.

caf• 15 years ago

In fact the portion of the map shown includes a minority of the world's population.

nikkaelle• 15 years ago

On topics where there's not many tweets (e.g. haskell), it's nearly impossible to tell that anything on the map changed at all. Perhaps the data also needs to be normalized?

skeletonjelly3• 15 years ago

Yeah it needs a few things done before it can become usable. Get rid of the assumption knowledge = frequency of keyword. Normalize the data. Account for population differences.

Would also be nice if you could pan around but it looks like the code relies on a static image.

answerly5• 15 years ago

Thanks for the great suggestions. All are features that we'll add in the future. The goal was really to get something out there that had a small bit of utility and spend more time on it if people found the visualization interesting. As I mentioned a few threads up, this is something that our outgoing summer intern worked on during his last few days with us and we wanted to release it before he headed back to school.

thetwentyone• 15 years ago

Population size needs to be factored in. NYC, LA/SF, Boston, London, Chicago, and a couple other large cities are pretty much always the top, primarily because they are the largest English speaking population centers.

ashrust• 15 years ago

Gotta wonder what the defn of 'knowledge' is here - just mentions of the keyword? Does that indicate knowledge?

answerly5• 15 years ago

No- it's not just keyword mentions. Our main product analyzes the both the content of an individuals Tweets and social factors to make decisions about what they know. I'd be happy to share more about how we do that- shoot me a note at joe@inboxq.com if you want to chat.

Heatmap of Twitter knowledge by location (heatmap.js + Google Maps)

Related Stories