Twittervision for the iPhone put out a great update over the weekend that does something even the desktop version cannot do. You can now double-tap any foreign-language tweet, and it will convert it into your native language.
Why is this important? If you ever used the previous iteration of the application, you know that it simply jumps around the globe, showing you random Twitter status updates. Many cannot be read unless you're fluent in that language, making it cute but fairly useless for most folks.
The translation takes about 10 seconds to work its magic, and you've got to be quick to touch, considering that the application hovers on a tweet only for half that amount of time. You can also single-tap any tweet with a link, and it will open it up in a minibrowser that includes a small plus button to bookmark the page for later reading.
Twittervision for the iPhone lets you translate foreign tweets on the fly. Just double-tap something you don't understand, and it will do its best.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Metagator Popurls has a fun new feature this morning called Popurls.TV that shows you a real-time traffic map of links people are clicking on, and also where they're clicking from. Clicking any single link will take you right to the original story. It's across between Digg Spy and Twittervision, and like the former, it's a fun way to see what's popular on the site. For a more exact account of what's doing well, there are also three sets of links above the map to show you the most trafficked stories within the last hour, day, and 78 hours.
If you feel so inclined, there's a full screen mode for the map, although I wouldn't recommend it unless you've got a speedy connection, as links tend to jump so fast, there's not a lot of time for it to catch up.
This isn't nearly as cool as some of the visualizations coming out of Digg's labs, but I think it's almost necessary at this point for content aggregation sites to provide several ways to ingest content besides a front page. The next logical step is for Popurls to let people browse geo map clicks by time, to see which stories are the most popular in which region at various points during the day.
[via Center Networks]
Popurls.TV shows you what people are clicking on in real time, along with where they're from.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
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Here's a mosaic we put together using Image Mosaic Generator and the Webware 100 logo.
The Flickr API has opened up a lot of fun tools over the years. This morning we got a tip about Image Mosaic Generator, a free service that creates neat-looking picture mosaics of uploaded images. The service uses Flickr images to make up each mosaic and lets users save the end result to their hard drive. Images have a fair bit of variation, although you're likely to see a few repeats close up. The service doesn't link back to the original Flickr images, which is a bit disappointing, but as a result, handles the conversion from image to mosaic in just a few minutes.
This is by no means one of the first tools to do this, but one of the simplest Web-based ones I've run into. Also worth checking out if you're playing around with Adobe's Apollo runtime, is Developer Derrick Grigg's mosaic creator, which lets you use Flickr shots that match search criteria. This could come in handy if you have a beach picture, as you could run it through the tool using public photos related to beaches.
Flickrvision shows you newly geotagged shots on Flickr using a Google Map.
(Credit: CNET Networks)The one thing these Web-based services still can't do is pull local photos on your hard drive to make up the mosaic, something that's not easily accomplished without software and a hefty photo library.
Flickrvision is a fun mashup that shows you real-time photos people have geotagged on Flickr using a Google Map. Mousing over them will display a larger preview and information about the shot in a lightbox pop-up. You can also click the thumbnail to go straight to the original shot.
Flickrvision was created by the same developer who made Twittervision, a similar service that shows the latest Twitter posts and where they originated from.
Flickr has its own mashup of geotagged photos, although it doesn't show real-time results like Flickrvision does.
I just read about Twittervision--on Twitter, of course. It's a cool Twitter/Google Maps mashup that constantly displays recently posted Twitter updates, located on a world map. It's a peek into the stream of consciousness of the Twittersphere. Robert Scoble thinks "memes are going to go nuclear with Twitter," and that this tool will help.
With some additional development, I can certainly see that happening. The site has only been live for a few hours, so I don't want to criticize it, but I do hope that the developer, David Troy, adds some filtering capabilities. It would be nice if you could just watch friends' Twitters, for example, or if you could get a live map view only of Twitter messages that contain certain keywords.
Troy has also created Twittermap, which shows the location of Twitter messages based on your search term (not real time, like Twittervision), and Twittersearch, which is a Twitter archive search engine.
Live from New York...
(Credit: CNET Networks)Want more Twitter coverage? See Six ways to improve Twitter (includes other Twitter map experiments), and The newbie's guide to Twitter.
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