sgruhier
The backend is written in Ruby. The daemon to index tweets use the great Intridea gem https://github.com/intridea/tweetstream.
The page http://onemilliontweetmap.com/ is simple Sinatra application, and I use REDIS pub/sub to push tweets to the browser.
Also twitter stream don't send 100% of the tweets, it will be to huge. But statically speaking, it should be enough to have a good picture.
May be there are some restrictions in Canada.
This map give us a lot of information about twitter more than the first fun and wow effect. I like that!
I really like that tweet demo. You can find a lot of interesting information, like tweets in your area as you said.
The heatmap is also interesting when you need to analyze huge amount of data like this.
You can also see where twitter is very active. I was surprised to see that Indonesia is very active.
This goal is to make something very easy to extend.
Donation just dont work. For example MongoID got $2800 for how many hours, days and months of work? And he's lucky, I don't have projects in mind but most of the time people get like $100.
I also agree about:
"why I keep seeing such negative feedback around Yehuda's choice of soliciting money to bring us Rails.app. Sure, it may just be a few of you, but if you don't want to give Yehuda money, fine, just don't. If you think Yehuda is asking for too much money, fine, just don't donate. If you just don't like Yehuda, fine, just don't donate."
Two thumbs up for kickstarter.com too!
I am Sébastien Gruhier, founder of Maptimize. If anyone has questions regarding about our service, please contact me at sebastien dot gruhier at maptimize dot com
Thanks
It's like make HTML/CSS for a webpage. First level, you create you HTML/CSS code and test it with Firefox usually. Then when you are happy with, you check safari/chrome and debug IE :).