Monday, May 11, 2009

Twitter Meets Google Street View: Stweet!

Thanks Mashable for this post on a pretty cool idea for a twitter/maps mashup.... nice idea, but not quite there yet.

May 9th, 2009 | by Pete Cashmore11 Comments

stweet2We’ve seen plenty of interesting Google Maps mashups over the years, and Twitter mashups too; but rather than just plotting Tweets on a map, why not go even further and show the street Tweets are posted from?

That’s what Stweet, a fun mashup of Google Street View and Twitter (Twitter reviews), attempts to do. In an imperfect way, it takes the co-ordinates posted by some Twitter apps, like TwitterFon (Twitterfon reviews) (location must be enabled), and uses that data to find the approximate street address the Tweet came from. It then overlays the Tweet on a Google Street View image.

If you’d like to test it out, the best city by far is San Francisco, with a high volume of Tweets. A dropdown menu lets you browse various US cities, and you can see if there are Tweets from countries not listed by changing the end of the URL to “city,country”. For instance, this is the URL for Tweets in London, UK.

Is it any use? Perhaps not, but it sure is an interesting distraction, and raises the question: do I want the world to know what street I’m on?

stweet

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