Online Networks Meet The Real World

This article talks about a new application that mixes the google maps street view with twitter to create an interactive tweet location finder. This application takes the vast social network of twitter which before consisted of only web based user nodes and has replaced them with nodes representing the actual physical location the tweet came from. In general it takes the graph of the twitter social network and overlays it over the graph of google maps addresses. I wonder if any strong correlations between the two graphs shapes could be found?

http://mashable.com/2009/05/09/twitter-street-view/

That is pretty cool. I feel like it would be interesting to see this go on in a more local setting - for instance, if you're at a press conference. It might be interesting to see who's sitting with who, and how their opinions may vary or be similar, or be affected by the other person. I know a lot of time, when tech bloggers are liveblogging, they talk about the crowd, and what people appear to be thinking/reacting. Having stweet in that situation would be interesting - though, i suppose it would be a huge invasion of privacy if you were actually able to pick out people.

Looking at this, if you could collect all the tweets, it would be interesting too to see if the same person tweets in the same/similar location. It would give some information about the importance of that place to the person - maybe they go there for coffee every day, or they pass by on the commute to work?