The Paris Map of Desire

The Map of Desire is a real-time map of Paris shoppers based on Twitter activity in the French capital. The creators of the map claim that it uses machine-learning to track the location and level of desire among Parisienne shoppers in real-time.

I'm not sure how much 'machine-learning' is actually taking place. What the map does is search geo-tagged Twitter messages posted in Paris for a number of key-words associated with shopping and desire (e.g. 'want', 'need'). Tweets saying that someone has bought something are shown on the map with orange markers and desires are shown in pink (looking at the code for the map I think the white markers show when someone swears on Twitter in Paris).

As with all these real-time Twitter maps the map is only showing a small subsection of the general population (Twitter users who share their location). However, if this is the demographic which retailers and advertisers actually want to target, then I guess this kind of real-time Twitter map could be useful. At the very least it is an interesting visualization of Twitter activity in Paris.