This is an interactive map that pulls tweets from Twitter that have hashtags relating to buildings on the University campus. For example if someone was to tweet "Come have your photo taken with the Olympic Torch at #poolehouse" the hashtag #poolehouse would place the tweet on Poole House on the map.

I came up with the idea after creating a questionnaire to find out if finding it hard to find events on campus was a problem that other people had. I asked:

Would it be helpful to have a service that shows you information from social networks without having to be signed up to those social networks?
100% answered yes.

Do you like having an idea about what is going on around you?
100% answered yes.

Would it be helpful to know what events are happening on the University Campus in real time?
100% answered yes.

How often do you want to know what's happening on campus?
17% always wanted to know and 83% wanted to know only when they’re bored.

Would it be helpful to see these events placed on a map so you can see what is near you?
100% answered yes.

I later conducted some user research to identify any unintended consequences of displaying tweets on a map directly from Twitter.

“Anyone from around the world could use the hash tag when tweeting and it would be displayed on the map. So you could get lots of spam and unwanted information being displayed.”
Adding a geo fence would quash this unintended consequence, allowing only local tweets to be displayed.

“What if someone tweeted a week ago and people see that tweet and think it is an event for today?”
Tweets would only be displayed from the current day to prevent this.

“The University buildings are quite big so what would happen if two tweets had the same building hash tag?”
The later tweet would replace the tweet before it so to overcome this unintended consequence I would have three sets of coordinates for each hash tag to allow a maximum of three tweets to be displayed for each building.

view the map