I wasn't sure whether to make it public any time soon, but given how interesting people are finding sites like Twistori the time seems right. Blaine mentioned it on the Gillmor Gang podcast yesterday, and it hasn't gone down since so I assume it will cope with more viewers!
I'm using the XIFF actionscript 3 library to speak to a server running OpenFire, and that server has a bot that broadcasts items from Twitter's public timeline as XMPP (Jabber) instant messages to everyone viewing the Flash site. The main reason it needs its own server is because for socket communication Flash is only allowed to connect to the domain it was served from, and therefore it can't connect to Google Talk or AIM from any server I can host it on.
Anyway, you can probably tell that I'm more interested in the technology than whether it's useful or not. It really is just a proof of concept. It's a bit silly because it's too fast to be readable. But it works! (Except when it doesn't. Let me know in the comments if it doesn't work for you?)
Silly or not, Firehose does expose one tiny piece of functionality right now. There's no filtering yet, but it currently highlights "twitter" by default, and you can see what it looks like with other words highlighted by using the URL #fragment, like this, or this, or this.
Clearly there are several next steps I could take with this. The same setup could also be used to subscribe to a particular set of users, or tracked keywords, or (with a little more server-side work) to geocode the tweets and plot them on a map, TwitterVision style. We're just getting started with this, and Twitter is the only public jabber bot I know of with this kind of volume of output (this BBC one looks interesting too though).
NB:– Twitter is a former client of my employer Stamen but we're not working with them officially at the moment. This is the same Jabber PubSub feed they made public a few weeks back, that people are mainly using to power Twitter searchengines.
Liz Goodman recently invited Mike and I to speak at the UC Berkeley School of Information. We took the opportunity to give a full length talk about a single project, Oakland Crimespotting, which is something of a rarity since we normally try talk about lots of things a little bit, rather than one thing in depth.
Mike started and finished the talk with an in-depth look at the motivations, technical details and social issues surrounding the site, which you can read about on his blog. In the middle I gave a brief overview of related projects and talked about the how the site sits alongside our other mapping work at Stamen. Mike suggested I use a reverse-chronological narrative structure that he liked from a book about Polish history, so I started with the stuff we've finished recently and working back to Stamen's early work with MoveOn and Mappr.
I tried to add a comment there with some blogs I subscribe to (some already mentioned, some not) but I suspect the spam filter thought I was nuts to try posting 20 links. So here are a few other blogs/feeds you might like, if you like Flowing Data and came here from there:
Eric is in Minneapolis at the moment talking about our work at the University of Minnesota. The talk has been in the works for a while but nicely coincides with W(e are )here, and exhibition we're participating in organised by Solutions Twin Cities.
We've prepared a special version of Trulia Hindsight for the show, using the experimental version of Modest Maps I made for Processing in February and animating data for around 1 million homes using OpenGL. We're not ready to distribute the data to a wider audience yet, but here's an example animation from the application:
Obviously using this probably makes you acquisition-friendly and/or more hire-able to Google?
But does the appearance of a service like this make it more attractive to leave Google? When do those FYIFV T-Shirts come out anyway?
And if you used to work at Google, and you left, would this style of development be something you'd miss? Would you use a former employer's service as a leg-up in your new gig?
Have enough people left Google trained in this style of web development to constitute a market segment in their own right?
I frequently get emails asking me about visualising collections of GPS traces as an animation. The OpenStreetMap community is way ahead of me on this one, and has a tool called Party Render to create animations of mapping activity.
Here's one that Mikel just pointed out from a recent mapping party in Mumbai:
