I like timelaps in photography, and I got the idea to use this technique to visualize foursquare activities on earth for one day, with the idea to have a nice « check-in wave » moving from east to west.
So I created a small processing sketch that stream ‘foursquare’ and ‘4sq’ message on twitter and display them as a point in the map if there is geo localisation data. And every minute, I took a picture, saved it and reset the status grabbed.
Here is the result I got :
Not as impressive as I expected, but the wave is observable, moving with the time 😀
What we can remark also is most of the activity are in « hotspot », generally big cities.
Big question mark on Turkey / Istanbul : I don’t know why this part is particularly active in time and compare to other places. I will try to check if it’s a bug in my code, or a glitch in libraries code, or if there is a logical explaination to that.