Animated Twitter Heat Maps

Birdplot is a new application that allows anyone to generate an animated heat map of any Twitter hashtag.

If you enter a hashtag term into Birdplot and select a date range you can automatically create an animated heat map that shows when and where people have tweeted about the topic. The application is a great way to track the geographical influence over time of a subject on Twitter. For example at the moment you could use Birdplot to show where and when people are tweeting '#pope'.

Creating a heat map with Birdplot literally takes a few seconds. All you need to do is enter a hashtag and a date range. The screenshot above is of a heat map I created showing tweets mentioning '#SXSW'.