Those of you who follow me on twitter might have noticed I’ve been showing some pictures of weird fish-bird things lately. So I thought I might let you all have a look at the early version of my Twitter Search Visualiser.
Twitbirds
(http://tenfiftyfour.com/twitbirds/twitbirds_v1.swf)
‘Twitbirds’ is a very simple twitter search visualiser, originally designed for twitter-centric events (possibly projected onto a wall to encourage users to tweet about hashtagged events). It searches twitter for a keyword, finds the user that submitted it and creates a bird representing that user. Birds flock around the screen and symbolise a sort of ‘hive’ of activity revolving around the topic.
In the bottom left corner of the screen you’ll find three boxes. The first is the progress bar, which tells you how long until the next search refresh. The second is the search box (fairly self explanatory), and finally the status bar – which merely updates you on how many tweeters have been downloaded.

Progress, Search and Status Bars.
Currently, the program is set to refresh every 30 seconds, and will only return results that have been tweeted since the program was opened.
Twitbirds searches for the keyword entered, find the user who submitted the tweet, then creates a bird-avatar for them. Birds will flock around the mouse cursor, and happily fly about the screen.
The more they tweet, the larger their bird gets. If a user doesn’t tweet within 3 minutes of their last tweet, their bird is removed in a puff of feathers.
Currently the app isn’t that optomised, and there is a variety of security sandbox issues ( files being hosted on different URLS cause issues with flash sometimes ) still to be resolved. However the version that is up now is fairly stable and should be fine for most of you to test! ( if you get an error, just ‘continue’ or ‘dismiss’ it, and see what happens…
Currently, the program is set to refresh every 30 seconds, and will only return results that have been tweeted since the program was opened. Twitbirds searches for the keyword entered, find the user who submitted the tweet, then creates a bird-avatar for them. Birds will flock around the mouse cursor, and happily fly about the screen.

A Default Avatar Bird
The more they tweet, the larger their bird gets. If a user doesn’t tweet within 3 minutes of their last tweet, their bird is removed in a puff of feathers.

Oh, the horror.
Currently the app isn’t that optomised, and there is a variety of security sandbox issues ( files being hosted on different URLS cause issues with flash sometimes ) still to be resolved. However the version that is up now is fairly stable and should be fine for most of you to test! ( if you get an error, just ‘continue’ or ‘dismiss’ it, and see what happens…
Feel free to post comments or suggestions. Enjoy.
– a.