Final Project

My WhoCares application allows users to either find out which part of the world is feeling happy or another emotion by clicking on one of the pre-assigned buttons or to visualise which part of the world is tweeting about a topic or news story at the time you asked in eleven large cities across the globe.

On the application’s start, the user can click on one of the buttons or type in their own choice, click on the text box and press enter. The WhoCares application will then search all eleven pre-selected cities and ten miles around the centre of the city and find any tweets that have been posted around that area. The application will then visualise how popular that subject is by increasing the size of a circle relative to the map and city. If no hits have been found, no circle will be created.

The purpose of my application is to see both how popular a subject can be worldwide and also to track where and how fast news stories can travel.

An example of this happening can be taken from a recent news story. Once a story broke out in America that a murderer may have been related to another set of murders, I ran the WhoCares. application to find out who had been tweeting about it. I did the same query shortly after and the circles had increased significantly, as you can see below.

Since the news story was based in America, they were the first to start tweeting about it, however London and Sydney also started as well.

This was taken at around 4pm GMT, so in Sydney and Tokyo for example they may not have been talking about it either because simply they are not interested or because they were still asleep at the time the news broke.

Some of the pre-defined emotion buttons search for emoticons such as ‘:)’ and ‘:( ‘, rather than the words i.e. ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ as I thought that they were more universal and would attract more hits from the countries that didn’t have English as a primary language.