Stellar Twitter Mashup: TwittEarth

Twitter mashups are a dime a dozen, and few are worth even a first-look, let alone a second. My personal exceptions have been few and far between. I’m a big fan of Foamee, but my list pretty much ended there.

Then along came TwittEarth, which lets you watch live “tweets” in real-time, geo-coded to show you their author’s location. It’s hardly the first time this idea has been kicked around but predecessors like GeoTwitter and TwitterVision, while functional, lack the “wow!” factor. TwittEarth is flat-out beautiful. It’s simple, fun, fast, and a brilliant time-waster. It lets you submit Twitter posts to your account from the TwittEarth interface, and it’s available as a screen saver (Windows-only for now but they’re promising an OSX version soon, thankfully).

The take-home lesson from this is simple: the small details matter. It’s those small details and added touches that push something typical into being extraordinary and memorable.

A hat tip to it’s creators, Thomas and Christophe from Digitas. Great job. I’ve never been much of a Twitter fan, but if anything were to entice me into using it, TwittEarth just might do the trick.