hpoom

TweetMap is a jQuery plugin where you can display recent tweets on a google map. The original idea was to have it work like TweetPeep where you can display all people that are talking about a common word, but due to the restrictions with the twitter API not returning location in the reply to search request on the API this has been hard to achieve. I have managed this by doing an extra request for each user to get their location, but you soon max out on the request into the API and then you see nothing on the map. I will try to get search support back in as with this feature you could do a fullscreen website background to show people talking about your site.

Download

You can download version 0.1 from here

How To Use It

To use the plugin you just need to call TweetMap on the element you want to display the map in, I have only tried DIV’s so far. You will need to pass no parameters to TweetMap as search has been removed until I can resolve the API limit issues. The element it is then called on will display a google map and pan round people who have tweeted recently showing what they are saying (see the example). You will also need to include google maps API version 3 in you page.

  <script src="http://maps.google.com/maps/api/js?sensor=false" type="text/javascript"></script>

Supported Params are:

• search – Word to search twitter for. REMOVED DUE TO ISSUES

Example Code

<script type="text/javascript">

  $( function() {

    $( '#tweetMapDemo' ).tweetMap();

  } );

</script>

Demo

A full screen demo can now be found here

ToDo

• Make this work with the twitter search API to show tweets that match a search word
• Support fetching friends tweets by passing in a username instead of a search word
• Allow time paused on each tweet to be passed in
• Support auto fetching of tweetpic images and display these

Version History

• 21/08/09 – 0.1 First release