Twittervision is a very cool and hypnotic Twitter-Google Maps mashup that we've written about before — it makes an excellent diversion on a lazy Friday — but what if you wanted a more personalized version of Twittervision? Say, a way to see where just your Twitter friends are writing from?
That's exactly what GeoTwitterous, a Yahoo Pipes mashup, does. Twittervision plots tweets on a map based on the person's location — either one that they've specified in their Twitter profile, or if they've used the special location syntax in a tweet.
GeoTwitterous extends that idea by including the ability to search by username and then displays each user's tweets clustered as a pin on a Google Map. It makes for a very handy way to see where your contacts are writing from at any given time. Of course the accuracy of GeoTwitterous depends on whether or not your Twitter contacts update their location frequently.
GeoTwitterous is the work of Tony Hirst, who also created the Google Calendar mapping mashup and other cool Yahoo Pipes tools that we've looked at before.
Hirst also has another cool Twitter tool he calls Serendipitwitterous, which “serendipitously find items to related to tweets in your Twitter feed.” Using the Yahoo content analysis/term extractor service, Serendipitwitterous attempts to find items — like related links, Slideshare posts, YouTube videos and more — that match the terms in a tweet.
Since Serendipitwitterous is at the mercy of Yahoo's analysis tools the results are rather hit or miss. At times it pulls in incredibly relevant links and video (it seemed eerily prescient when I first tested it), but then other tweets return less pertinent or totally non sequitur links. Still, although the results aren't perfect, it can be a fun way to discover previously unknown content that's related to what you're twittering about.
By the way, Compiler has a new Twitter presence. Feel free to follow us for updates and links (the RSS feeds around here are on a bit of delay, so Twitter will be much more up-to-date). If you have a question or comment, go ahead and post it, though I can't promise we'll respond to everything.
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