Twitter is a powerful tool for identifying realtime news and events at a global level. But I would like to know whats happening in my neighbourhood. Be it a our local team winning the state championship or a dust storm. Well this is what we plan to do. To start off, we just have 8 cities/countries but we would like to reach a level when we tell you about a break-in in your next block.
It was May 16th and results of Indian Elections 2009 were being annouced. The top twitter trend for that day was "Grey's Anatomy" and
Indian Elections didnt even make an appearance :(. I wrote up a quick script and to see if we even stood a chance. Turns out whole of India
tweets much less than a city like NY or SF.
But still I would like to know what people in India are talking about. So I modified the script to calculate the actual trends and since
I was not using my full quota of bandwidth on my server, I just kept it running for few places.
On the day google went down, I looked at the numbers and I was like wow. By looking at the graph, I could tell in which places google was down and in which places
it was not. There was an earthquake in SF and unlike twitter's early days it got no mention because it never made to trending list.
One day there was a dust storm in Delhi and other day it was a barcamp. Things I would have never been able to know about even though I just live 20 kms from Delhi. I decided to take a vacation from my vacation :D and productize it so that others can also use it. And the rest you can already see.
We are just two people and we don't own a garage we can work from, so we just use our rooms :).