Since early 2010, I’ve visited about 10 states and a few different cities in Texas. Do you find it creepy that people can tell that about me from my twitter account? Apparently the author of the program named “Creepy” does based on his name for the app that generated the picture above. Personally, I find it pretty cool that I can map out all the places from which I’ve shared information on twitter.
If you’ve attended my Mapping Mashups in SharePoint Presentation or read my blog series on the same, you’re probably not surprised in my interest in maps or my interest in sharing with others.
What do you think? Is this creepy?
If you want to see your own tweets on a map or even someone else’s, download creepy from ilektrojohn.github.com/creepy, install it on your linux or Windows PC and enter a twitter handle to generate a map like above.
It’s a little buggy. I clicked the geolocate target about a dozen times and received an error each time. The first time took the longest and got about 50 tweets. Another time it loaded my tweets back to March 2010, but it hasn’t been able to get all my tweets yet or my flickr photos. If it did, you’d see dots in Seattle, Las Vegas and Germany.
It’s cool that you can do it , the creepy factor is that others can do it also for your data . Ok, it might not be “creepy” by default, not everyone has something to hide or care if his/her whereabouts are publicly available to everyone.
The problems you are describing come from twitter not responding to API requests every time. Creepy tries to handle this by internally caching results, so every subsequent time you search, it tries to fetch only the tweets that it couldn’t retrieve the previous times.
Glad you found it interesting !
Yiannis,
Thanks for reading and thanks for making the app. Overall, I think it’s a great concept. I can’t wait until you add PicasaWeb and Facebook.
-Tom