What did you do on your summer vacation this year? I got sunburned and helped my son Harry catch his first fish. Pretty good summer, I thought.
Meet Viswa Mani. He spent the summer on the Microsoft intern program, joining our search test team. His TweetHeat Map App won the “OSD (ie Online Services Division) Intern Hack Day”. Ever wonder what people are really saying where on Twitter? Viswa spent some of his summer figuring out how to show you. Welcome to the TweetHeat Map App.
Over to Viswa Mani…
“In “Intern Hack Day”, interns are encouraged and helped to develop working ideas in a number of areas. A workshop kicked off the first ever Intern Hack Day and introduced a few new technologies that we could use, including the Bing Map App SDK. The product teams provided support for the 10 teams that participated – team sizes varied from 6 to 1 (i.e. me). There were awards for audience favorite and best hack, awarded by the judges.
“Being an intern at Microsoft was a great experience. Thanks to the Intern Coordinators, especially Caroline Bulmer, School Recruiters and social group coordinators who did an awesome job of making sure that work at Microsoft was loads of fun.
How the TweetHeat Bing Map App came about
“The initial working version of the map app for Hack Day took a weekend to put together, even allowing for it being my first time experience with Silverlight applications. However, with support from the Bing Maps team, I managed to get the preview rolling for Hack Day. After motivation and more support from the team, I decided to make a production version to be launched with Bing Maps.
What the Map App does
“The map app helps users visualize the public response/feeling towards a product, event or really any topic. All tweets related to the searched keyword are analyzed using Natural Language Processing, more specifically Sentiment Analysis. The analysis assigns a score from 1-5, from a very negative to very positive emotion in the tweet. The analyzed tweets are mapped on Bing Maps based on where they were tweeted from.
“To help bring the visualization to life, I created two views. The first shows individual tweets on the map colored according to the emotion of the tweet. A red tweet indicates a score of ‘1’, or very negative emotion. A green tweet indicates a score of ‘5’, or very positive emotion. Other shades fall in between according to emotion. The second visualization provides you with the overall emotion by area. This view colors the map area to convey an overall twitter user feeling.”
So whether you want to see how a new product is landing or what everyone else thought of last night’s gig, check out TweetHeat.
Congratulations to Viswa Mani, and thanks for a great app.
For the rest of us, there’s no need to wait until next summer to bring your Map App idea to the world. You can get going today here. If you’d rather make your impact in good company during an internship at Microsoft, here’s where you need to go.
So go check out your local TweetHeat here – and don’t forget the Twitter Map if you want to dive in to the detail of who’s saying what.
Matthew Quinlan, Bing Maps