Forget about the Twitter’s “boring” public timeline which is filled with text. You can now easily visualize tweets using Flittr.cc. A mash up of the two social platforms – Twitter and Flickr, Flittr was developed by James Harton in March 2009 and it’s powered by Rails. Bascially, what this interesting app does is that it grabs the latest tweet from the public timeline and fiddles with text to generate the sixteen most suitable pictures related to the tweet on Flickr. It will then displays them as a mosaic.
Although the developer behind this tool says that it’s rather slow and he is working on it, but I personally feel that it’s quite fast as the clever system has to retrieve a random tweet from the public timeline on Twitter and automatically makes a search query on Flickr search to find the best pictures from the world’s most popular photo-sharing platform. What’s more is that this complicated process is able to complete within 5 seconds, a pretty impressive feat. Flittr is indeed an unique creation as it allows users to enhance their visualization by combining both pictures from Flickr and text from tweets by users on Twitter.
On the other hand, you can try Flittr yourself by adding your Twitter username to the end of the url: http://flittr.cc/user/your user name.
Anything picture base application will slow the traffic speed. Low bandwith region such as Indonesia would prefer faster speed rather than colourful picture with slower speed.
Thanks for the blog post Xavier. I’m glad you liked it.