Twitter Turns Cities Into Mountain Ranges Using Geotagged Tweets
Twitter has created incredible elevated map visualisations of three different cities using geotagged tweets. San Francisco, New York and Istanbul have been turned into mountain ranges, with points on each map elevated to a height dependent on the number of geotagged tweets posted in the area. Twitter has also started testing thumbnail picture previews in tweets.
Nicolas Belmonte, one of Twitter’s data visualisation scientists, created the topographic models based on every single one of the millions of geotagged tweets that have been recorded in each of the three cities. Data editor Simon Rogers explained the visualisations in a post on the Twitter blog:
The mountain ranges you see here are not natural geography but the landscape of Tweets — billions of them, visualized across cities. The peaks represent the places most Tweets are sent from, the troughs the fewest. Explore New York closely and you can pick out the Brooklyn and the Queensboro bridge — even the Staten Island ferry.
There are eight different ways to view the visualisations: heat, fill, watermark, clear, contour, terrain, grid and dark. You can also switch the elevation between low, medium and high.
In related news, some users have noticed that Twitter is testing preview thumbnails in tweets containing images, so that users don’t necessarily have to expand tweets to see the images within.
What do you think of Twitter’s newest data visualisations?
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Twitter Turns Cities Into Mountain Ranges Using Geotagged Tweets
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Reviewed by Anonymous
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Monday, July 01, 2013
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Anonymous
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