In a recent post on Twitter’s new geolocation feature and the kinds of apps it would allow developers to create, we received a comment from Bob Hitching telling us to check out GeoMeme.
GeoMeme is Hitching’s side project, a real-time web app and also a location-aware mobile web app for iPhone and Android phones. It allows users to see and compare trends in specific locations; for example, you could see the most tweeted-about musicians performing at an award show or the most-tweeted political buzzwords in a given state or town.
Here’s how it works: Users choose a location on the map (powered by Google Maps), and they select from the list of current trending Twitter topics or type in two search terms to compare.
GeoMeme then measures and compares the number of matching tweets within the stated geographical area based on public data from a number of geotagged tweets from mobile Twitter apps.
For example, on this Sunday evening, we can see that the Vikings are beating the Bears… in Twitter mentions in Minneapolis, at least:
The app might also be interesting for brands. We can see here that legendary local burger chain In N Out wins over Carl’s Jr. in Twitter mentions in Los Angeles:
We can also use the app to check the pulse of holiday revelers in New York City:
It would be even cooler to see a sentiment-measuring feature; i.e., I’d like to compare tweets of the terms “liberal” and “conservative” in Virginia, then see what percent of those tweets were negative or favorable. Not all mentions of a given term are going to be good ones, after all.
Take GeoMeme for a test drive in your town to see what your neighbors are tweeting about, and let us know your thoughts in the comments! Do you think that with more development, GeoMeme could be a useful tool?