Real-time Local Twitter Trends

Twitter can be an excellent source for trend analysis. Twitter itself displays several popular topics on its frontpage which are sorted by minute, day and week. It does become more difficulty to spot trends if they are not displayed on the Twitter homepage though. The two problems that arise are finding those trends if they are not displayed on the Twitter website and that it is near impossible to find local trends as they are not displayed by Twitter and also not available via filtering options on the social messaging site.

Trendsmap is a Google Maps and Twitter mashup that solves both of these problems. The tool displays a world map that is displaying popular topics based on the region the user is looking at. It is for instance possible to see right now that the people in the Philippines are tweeting about the typhoon Pepeng while the most popular topics on the US west coast are the movie Zombieland, Halloween and the NL West Champs.

Since Trendmaps is a Google Maps mashup it is possible to zoom in and out of the map. This only makes sense in regions of the world where Twitter is a popular form of communication. A click on a popular topic will display trends and latest messages on the same screen. The box that is displayed on the right side of the website usually contains a short description of the trend and links to websites for additional information.

You can check out topics of interest for many major cities of the world, with cities such as London, New York, Munich, Vienna or Sydney covered by the application. For each item you are also getting over time information, access to the most recent tweets and additional information that may be of interested to investigate it further.

Trendsmap is an interesting Google Maps Twitter mashup. More so for researchers and users who like to stay up to date on certain topics.

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