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Tag: TwitterLocal

TwitterLocal: It’s back… and now it’s all AIR all the time

Rick Turoczy on January 13, 2009

Remember TwitterLocal ne TwitterWhere? That great site that allowed you to access a stream of tweets based on where people lived? And that provided a list of the 30 most Twitter-savvy cities?

Well, when Twitter changed their API rules to survive the summer of FAIL whale, it crippled the service. And, as such, we’ve been scrapping and scraping to find resources that allow us to find local folks.

TwitterLocal is back—as an Adobe AIR application. Feel free to download the brand spanking new version and get to searching.

TwitterLocal

Never let anyone say that Matt King won’t find a better way.

Since Twitter cut off their Jabber feed from TwitterLocal, we had to rely purely on the XML API, which meant that only about 20% of Tweets from the public timeline got into TwitterLocal. Now that Twitter has a location-based search API, we don’t have to cache the posts anymore. So now, TwitterLocal is going to be purely an Adobe AIR based application that allows you to filter Tweets by location.

With the new Air app, TwitterLocal supports regional searches with various radii. And it supports multiple tabs—so that you can watch a number of different regions at the same time.

TwitterLocal Tabs

Plus, the beauty of AIR is that it’s crossplatform, right out of the box.

So nice to have this tool back. Now, if we could only get Matt back from his Great Britain junket—our own local version of “Where the Hell is Matt?“

TwitterLocal Leader Board adds Top Twitterers by region

Rick Turoczy on May 8, 2008

With TwitterLocal, Portland’s Matt King took a interesting foray into tracking Twitter users based on their geographical location.

But was that enough for Matt? Oh no.

So, he had to go and make it even more compelling by adding a “Leader Board,” that listed the top 30 Twitter cities, based on the number of tweets per capita.

Brilliant!

Still not enough for Matt.

But now he really may have gone too far. Because he just snuck in what could amount to one of the most compelling slicing-and-dicings of the Twitter types I’ve seen.

That’s right folks. The Twitter leader rankings heretofore relegated to the global stage of Tweeterboard have now—thanks to Matt—taken on a decidedly local flavor.

The TwitterLocal Leader Board now provides the leading Twitter users for each city. (Here’s a snapshot of Portland’s leading Twitter users over the last 24 hours, for example.)

As an added bonus, this new view into Twitter locales also provides a flowing tweet stream from local residents.

Our little TwitterLocal is now a big ol’ “Pulse of [your leading Twitter city here],” with insight into who is currently contributing the most to the conversation.

Tweet globally, rank locally.

For more, take a moment to review the TwitterLocal Leader Board and click through to some of the leading locales.

Tweet for tweet: Top 30 cities on Twitter

Rick Turoczy on April 9, 2008

Portland-based TwitterLocal, the service built by Matt King that allows you to create an RSS feed of Twitter users for a particular location, has just moved added a feature that takes the site from a one-time visit to a regular destination—a leader board for the top 30 cities on Twitter.

The leader board currently ranks cities by the number of tweets by residents in a rolling 24-hour period.

Glancing at it a few minutes ago, Tokyo was in the lead with San Francisco running a close second. Paris leads the Europeans. And our hometown of Portland is sitting around #14 or so.

From 8:00PM, April 8, 2008 through 8:00PM, April 9, 2008, the list looked something like this:

  1. Tokyo
  2. San Francisco
  3. New York City
  4. 寅島市南区
  5. Paris
  6. (Japan)
  7. (Entre mi cuarto y mis zapatos)
  8. London
  9. São Paulo
  10. Los Angeles
  11. Chicago
  12. Seattle
  13. Toronto
  14. Portland, OR
  15. Boston
  16. Washington, DC
  17. (United States)
  18. Austin
  19. (Mexico Distrito Federal)
  20. (California)
  21. Atlanta
  22. Taipei
  23. Sydney
  24. London
  25. Osaka
  26. (Brazil)
  27. Madrid
  28. (Mexico)
  29. Melbourne
  30. Barcelona

As you can see, there is some weirdness can show up in the results. King notes these flaws in the system:

  • The seemingly high count of random places like “my pc”, “cybertron”, etc. are the geocoding service’s way of having fun. It seems some fake locations get assigned coordinates to somewhere in Kansas.
  • There is also a very high count of locations with asian characters, which again the geocoding services give only one location. Other than that the numbers are fairly accurate.

Despite these minor foibles, TwitterLocal’s leader board is the first location-specific Twitter analysis that I’ve encountered which actually begins to show which locations have caught the Twitter bug.

And as impressed as I was with TwitterLocal’s service, I’m sure to find this type of competitive ranking completely addictive, at the very least. I’m sure I’ll be checking TwitterLocal leader board, obsessively, over the coming months to see if we can get Portland to crack the top 10. At the very least.

Did your hometown make the list? There’s only one way to find out.