Selasa, 26 Januari 2010

Twitter Never Sleeps - TimeLapse Tutorial

The busy twitter service never sleeps. I was not sure about this and so I wanted to test it. Over the weekend the activity on the tweet mapping service twittermap.tv was recorded and here we have now a timeLapse of the activity. And actually, twitter does not sleep!
It is busy all the way round the weekend.
Twittermaps the location of the outgoing tweets according to the geoLocation. However there is a bit of confusion at the moment what this actually is. The information was only recently introduced by twitter and is not used very much by users and developers. So there i a workaround in place. twitter codes via Google the location saved in the profile of the twitter user and adds this as a geoLocation. Similar the actual geoLocation field also updates the location of the profile, so a lot of confusion around this at the moment.
Because of this most of the tweets in this visualisation come from central London, Westminster, around the House of Parliament. This is because this is Google’s geoLocation for ‘London’. The blue lines that start cluttering up the screen are @tweets, directed at another user.
If you have been tweeting over the weekend it is very likely that you find the message in the clip some where, check the clock on the top right corner. If you happen to spot your tweet in the clip, drop me a line.


Music Cerberus Engine by Klez on mp3unsigned.com

The clip is produced via a screen grab tool, that would capture the map about three times a second, e.g. 3fps. Tools for this are available online for example SnapzPro or screenFlow. More software for the mac can be found at pure-mac. This is then either put together, if a real timeLapse, or processed in the software if a video. For clips a low frame rate is advisable, most likely you don’t want to watch the whole weekend in real time. You process the raw material, in my case with 3fps it ended up being some 20 GB, to fit a clip with 25 or 30 fps. The processing brings it down to some 9 GB, in my example. To speed it up you need some video processing software. Take iMovie or Premiere, I was using QuickTime Pro, I love the tool. There is no simpler way to speed up the clip. Simply copy all, and past and fit to a five minute clip.
As a nice feature to visualise the time passing I have placed a desktop clock in the frame. This gives a good indication of time and speed.

We have currently the twitter virus her at CASA. The content mining started with the CASA version of the ukSnow map, the iPhone signal strength map and we are developing some more tools - coming soon.

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