burritos ’round the world: a @bingtmaps joint

One of the projects I’ve been working on at Microsoft FUSE Labs over the past few months is Bing Twitter Maps – showing geolocated tweets as they happen. (It’s one of the applications inside the beta versoin of a new Bing Maps, which you should check out, if you haven’t already). We’ve just released a new version of Twitter Maps that includes the ability to embed a custom Twitter map into your site.

Just like with the main site, there are all sorts of options – your map can be scoped to a @user or keyword, and show results from anywhere, or keep the viewport fixed on a location. The Tweets shown will always be the most recent that match your criteria. If at anypoint someone viewing the embed badge gets sufficiently intrigued to check out more about a location, @user or keyword, clicking any of those buttons links to the full experience at Bing maps. The embedded map will show Silverlight (cooler) if it’s installed, otherwise it will show a JavaScript version.

Being a California kid, who has since been dragged voluntarily moved elsewhere, I’m always curious to see if there’s anywhere in the world that can match the San Francisco Burrito. So here’s a Bing Twitter Map showing the most recent Tweets containing “burrito” anywhere in the world, as part of that elusive (and probably futile) quest.

Here’s the iframe code for this embed:

<iframe src="http://www.bing.com/twitter/maps/embed?version=1.0&amp;eid=785005709&ampkeyword=burrito" frameborder="0" height="350" width="590" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Check out http://bing.com/twitter/maps and the embed wizard will help you make your own map chock full o’ Tweets!

update!: pitchfork + coachella + twitter + bing = hipsters on a map! pitchfork, the quintessential indie-rock hispter music blog, has (of course) a site up following coachella, the quintessential indie-rock hipster music festival. to give their readers a chance to follow the action live, they used the bing twitter maps embed functionality to provide a live geo-stream of all the action. nice! (looks like Beyonce gave a surprise performance w/ Jay-Z?)

reflections on starting a mini-meme

I really don’t like the Yankees, mostly because of their team salary is 227% of the league mean which I think gives them an outrageous advantage over other teams. So I’m pulling hard for the Phillies in the Series. And Monday morning, I posted the following Tweet: “Go Phillies. #CheeringForTheYankeesIsLike hoping investment bankers get really huge bonuses – at least 8 figures.” Kinda proud of my clever hashtag, I then posted this: “…Hoping someone w/ more Twitter clout than I can help popularize #CheeringForTheYankeesIsLike”…which was RT’ed by college buddy Lizzie O’Leary, who called to task some heavy hitters, and off it went.

Over the next day or so, lots and lots of people posted their own tribute to Yankee ludicrousness, including John Berman, Dave Winer, Jake Tapper, Jake Tapper, and Jake Tapper. Not quite a full-fledged meme worthy of being a trending topic. But humor me a mini-meme, yes?

Some of my favorite #CheeringForTheYankeesIsLike include a hashtag convert, making fun of the Red Sox, references to Rocky (of course), Hoosiers, dunking on 4th graders (yes, from me. but it’s funny), and asking for more Soylent Green.

Some takeaways from the experience:

• It indeed feels very much like trying to start the wave at the ballpark
  • …except instead of jumping up and down after a few beers and yelling repeatedly……you’re looking for the guy (or gal) who knows the guy (or gal) [repeat] with the keys to the Jumbotron (or really, who is the Jumbotron)
• Very soon after it takes off, nobody knows (or cares?) you started it
  • I amassed all of 2 new followers. Probably a random occurrence
  • Even my friend who sits next to me didn’t believe I started it 3 hours after the first Tweet
• It will quickly spiral in ways that subverts your original intent, you don’t agree with, makes no sense, is funny but maybe inappropriate and might even make you sick
• Once it hits a certain volume, there’s no effective way to distill the data (find the funniest, etc…)
  • …project opportunity here???

p.s. Apologies to the Bing Twitter Maps team for being distracted for most of the day.

Update: check out friend/colleague Gilad Lotan’s vizualization of the spread of #CheeringForTheYankeesIsLike