Watch that Heat Map Grow & Glow

David Troy's awesome Twittervision map shows real-time Twitter messages on a Google Map.

Twittervision was one of the first non-transport related real-time maps and has been the inspiration for many other real-time animated maps. Twittervision now also includes another amazing innovation - a real-time heat map of photographs posted to Twitter.

If you switch off the 'tweets' layer you can view a heat map of real-time photos being posted on Twitter. The heat map actually appears and grows on the map in real-time. Very cool!


The New York Times' Tracking Taxi Flow is an excellent animated heat map that shows taxi pickups throughout the week in New York. The data comes from millions of taxi trips taken between January and March, 2009.

The biggest hot spot in New York in the mornings seems to be around Penn Station. Grand Central also seems to be a popular place to pickup taxis before work. Late at night the hotspots seem to be centred around Broadway, presumably as night goers are heading home.


Cooler Planet run a free service to help the public find green businesses and service providers in their area. Cooler Planet took all of the solar energy inquiries that they received over a number of years and produced an animated heat map, showing where those enquiries came from.

To animate the Solar Energy Enquiries Map select 'Time Lapse' and the map will add all the enquiries, quarter by quarter, from 2007 to 2009. Areas that have made the most enquiries appear in red on the map.