I’m quite excited about looking into integrating Twitter with Flash, there are a few applications here which I am about to show which look very cool. As far as I know to integrate twitter with flash you need to use it’s API which can be found here. There are a lot of applications out there now, you can find a big list here. A few I picked out which I thought were quite interesting:
- Twittervision which is quite a well known application, uses google maps and displays in the map where people are talking from, there is a method in the Twitter API which allows you to get the Geocodes from each tweet, and therefore you can place exactly where people are tweeting from. I think that Twittervision visualizes this data very well.
- Twuzzer takes the same concept as Twittervision, but you type in your area and you can see the last 10 posts which were posted in your town/city. I think this is quite a good idea, and possibly an idea which Twittervision can develop, as it add’s that extra interactivity to the application. As explained in my essay, there are 3 concepts which define Interactivity (Participation, Customisation and Dynamic data). Twittervision currently only has one of the concepts, Twuzzer on the other hand has some participation and also as the user types in their town/city, it also add some customisation.
- TwitterSphere-Visualiser is a very small application which takes data from the public timeline, this doesn’t use any filters so it shows all the most recent tweets, posted anywhere around the world. I think the animation makes it quite sweet, and something like this would be quite enjoyable to make I think. The aesthetics of the application follows the same design as Twitter it’s self and the bird animations I think go well with the application. I think using tweets from around the world works well with my essay question, because even though the public do not realize they are apart of this application, they are creating the art. I looked into some more applications which use the public timeline in this way:
- Twitterfall again uses the public time line, and as the name suggests, implies that the program makes a “waterfall” out of twitter tweets! I think this is a good idea, especially as it has a constant fall of posts, and works very effectivly. Although this seems quite cool, I’m looking for something a bit more interactive, at the moment this only shows dynamic data, and you can only view the public time line (apart from if you sign in). The next few applications I found has a lot more interactivity and I feel are very interesting.
- Cloud this application is very, very simple. The user writes in what they want to search, and can click on tags, after that it will send to Twitter’s search, which is an HTML page generated by Twitter’s ATOM feed, there are ways to get ATOM feeds into flash, so that is another way of parsing tweets from twitter into flash. I think this idea could come to something, and might be easier to use Twitter’s ATOM feed then sorting out it’s API.
- Twistori, I really like this application. The user picks what mood they are in, and the application receives all the recent posts with that mood in. Again like Twitterfall, it is a constant stream and doesn’t stop which I feel is very effective, it almost looks like a poem, as all the words start on a new line. Could I create a poem application which gets data from twitter, can rearrange and drag the posts around. This could come to something?
As I was thinking about the poem idea, I realized that Tristan Tzara also uses poems as his artwork in his work 25 Poems. He didn’t create any poems, however he gave the public some instructions:
- Take a newspaper.
- Take a pair of scissors.
- Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
- Cut out the article.
- Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
- Shake it gently.
- Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
- Copy conscientiously.
- The poem will be like you.
- And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.
As you can imagine, taking random words out of a bag, shuffling them and re-arranging them would just be a piece of paper with a load of random words on it, but it would be considered a poem. I could modernise this idea, by getting random posts from around the world, the users would then be able to drag and re-arrange or randomly shuffle. I think this could be quite a good idea as it would relate well to my essay.
