This morning I stumbled across a new service – http://twittearth.com, think Geotagged twitters.
It uses Flash to display twitters live from around the world. Whenever someone posts on twitter, an funky little 3D icon is placed on globe at location they twittered from, along with a callout with the content they posted.
This is incredibly addictive to watch, only problem is it seems to be restricted to the public timeline, rather than that of your friends / followers. I’m sure this functionality is on it’s way. You however, sign in and twitter directly from the site, a nice convenient touch.
twitterearth is also available as screen saver. I’ve tried it out and have a couple of complaints, the first being mulit-monitor support. This is fairly common complaint amongst most screen savers, it’s limited to 2 monitors. I run up to 4 monitors and having 2 of those screen-saverless, is less than desirable. The other downside is a lack of options, something as simple as allowing mouse movements while the screen saver is running would be very useful. Often people twitter links, so if your watching and you see a link that sounds inviting, you can’t click on it because any mouse movement will end the screen saver.
Overall though it’s a great visual experience, something quite unique, like most apps these days, I hope they extend further than just twitter support and move to the socialthing model which includes all your social network activity.