50,000 tweets
This is a rendering of the 50,000 tweets in the hour surrounding news of Steve Jobs' death. News breaks at around 19:36 EST, which you can see clearly below. The geocoder was able to parse 43,056, or about 86% of the tweets.
Twitter Dots |
Realtime streaming of geolocated Twitter tweets |
This is a rendering of the 50,000 tweets in the hour surrounding news of Steve Jobs' death. News breaks at around 19:36 EST, which you can see clearly below. The geocoder was able to parse 43,056, or about 86% of the tweets.
As it so happens, I had launched TwitterDots to crawl the Twittersphere for keywords related to "apple", in light of the iPhone 4S launch. I had left it running until I realized that there was news of Steve Jobs' passing. I have continued leaving it running as it processes Tweets (it can store them faster than it can process them into the database), but you can see in the screenshots below that the news breaks just around 19:35/19:36 EST. Keep in mind the granularity of the data is less accurate than a monitoring of "Steve Jobs" or "#iSad" for example, but the difference is nonetheless stark.
Rest in Peace, Steve.
It turns out geocoding nearly 1 million tweets is a lot more effort than I had envisaged, but somehow it was accomplished. I hope the video below does some sort of justice to the masses of Tweeters who used the keyword "earthquake" between March 9 and 11, 2011.
I found this set to be a fairly interesting one given the amount of buildup it creates. I have yet to understand where the second flurry comes from on Monday evening, though I suspect it may be because of the TV-reruns?
The following video is the one presented at yesterday's Hack Democracy meetup in San Francisco. What a fantastic opportunity to meet people from all walks, all collaborating and working on understanding how social media can affect and promulgate change.
I will be presenting at HackDemocracy tomorrow, Wednesday March 2, at GAFTA at 6:30pm in San Francisco. The event is free. For further details, please visit
For those interested in following how the earthquake news propagated
through Twitter, please visit the following link:
Update: I had mistakenly switched the dates for the graphs. They have been since corrected.
With all the fanfare about IBM Watson over, here's a bit of a fun recap. I won't go over much of the precise statistics yet just because I haven't the time, but here are some fun graphs and statisics.
Over the 24 hour period between 10am Monday and 10am Tuesday, I captured 49,164 tweets with the word "Watson" in it, removing those that referred to Emma Watson and Shawn Watson (there were a few). When plotting a minute-by-minute count of the tweets, you can see a massive spike just around the time Watson makes his mistake. In the 8th minute after 5pm PST this evening, or 8pm EST, 576 tweets were written about Watson.
February 15 (click for larger - times are PST)
February 16
Thank you all for your feedback for the poll below. While "poop" is an interesting candidate, I think I may hold off on those for now. "pancakes" is potentially good, but it would be nice to use words that have global perspective as well.
Stay tuned for new features to come up, including gender identification, tweet cleanup so it's easier to read, word clouds, and much more!
I'm always excited to get feedback and input - if there are keywords that you'd like to see or try out, please let me know. The only reason I haven't enabled unrestricted input is that handling Twitter is a bit of a hassle, and I can't overtax my existing resources (as Valentines Day demonstrated). Please fill out the form below!
Before my server went south during midday on Valentines, I was able to capture some 98,000 tweets containing the word "valentine". Click on each thumbnail for a fullscreen version. You're always welcome to use the data I get - if you're interested, please ping me.
Stay tuned - there are more exciting things to come, like rolling out our own geocoder and making more interesting posts. If you have keyword suggestions, I'd love to hear it here.
Stanford CS grad student, compulsive hacker, bitten by the startup bug. Find me on Twitter at @rioakasaka.
