#uksnow Twitter Animation - Google Earth 5
A much more significant event than the release of Google Earth 5.0 yesterday was the fact the much of Britain (particularly S. England) was covered by a sprinkling of snow. 
As a knock-on of this there’s been a large amount of media buzz about the use of Twitter as a mob-sourced geo-mashup generator to show snowfall.
Twitter users have been posting the first half of their postcode, plus the amount of snow in their location. 0 = no snow, 10 = bucket loads. ie: “#uksnow W12 9/10″
Developers have been mashing-up that data. Check out Ben Marsh’s neat, live Google Map mashup of this: #uksnow Tweets
#uksnow Twitter Animation, Google Earth 5
#uksnow Tweet Timeline (40kB)
Download the kml file, and use the time slider at the top left of the screen to play it back.
Couple of new techy things to notice if you have the new Google Earth version.
- I’ve used the KML gx:TimeSpan element in my Document level lookAt so that by default the time slider displays one hours worth of Tweets. Notice how GE flys back in time after the KML loads.
- The icons expanding and contracting during playback is a built-in feature of the new version of GE.
Related posts:
- Visualizing Twitter Activity Inside the Google Earth Plugin
- Google Earth 5, World Time Zone Clock - Javascript and KML
- When two satellites collide, in Google Earth
Hey James,
just recently picked up the google earth API and have been drooling at your work, while learning how to figure this out.
keep up the good work!
Hi James
I wondered whether you could provide an insight into how you gathered the activity from twitter?
Thanks
Gareth
Gareth - I searched for #uksnow using the API
It just returns the 100 most recent posts. so I run a script to automate the process. Using the oldest Tweet returned by one search as the max_id value for the next.
The beauty of the uksnow activity is postcodes are included in the text. Normally, locations would have to be collected separately. Probably quickly hit the API limit and get my IP blocked in that case.
This would be incredibly valuable if there is ever a pandemic. Can someone please set something up so people can tweet incidences of infection and have it mapped in GE?
I loved this so much I’ve tried to replicate it on the web - http://uksnow.tombh.co.uk
It’s not quite the same (yet!) but you can, at least, get a similar feel for the flow and movement. And it always displays the latest tweets each time you refresh the page.
Tom,
- was checking out your code to see how you’d done it. Good stuff. Surprised you can pull out that level of performance from the JS Maps API.
Actually I already saw your map yesterday
Yeah performance isn’t bad, though it does get sluggish when dealing with the 20,000+ tweets of the full archive. I’m thinking of different ways to program it to get squeeze a little more speed from it.
My app’s still going this year, I’ve even added cloud satellite imagery now
I made a Youtube video for the recent deluge we’ve had http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N8Yoouh8-k
Enjoy!