Google Maps / Twitterlocal Mashup
Having been an enthusiastic user of Twitter for a little while now, I was very pleased to see a service come out not too long ago called Twitterlocal. Twitterlocal allows you to enter a zip code and select a range in miles, and it will find tweets of all the people inside that circle who have tagged their location within Twitter.
It’s a convenient way to see what’s going on in a particular community, and is especially cool to watch the local groupthink when big events happen like college graduations or concerts, or when crazy weather goes through an area. Twitterlocal offers their data in HTML, RSS, and XML.
On the other side of things, Google Maps can get you a longitude and latitude with a simple click. By combining the two using a database of the longitude and latitudes for just about every town in the US, one should be able to determine the zip code of a click in Google Maps. That in turn gives you the URL of the appropriate Twitterlocal XML feed to read from for tweets pertinent to the area.
Crappy weather outside and a willing Prototype library were all the excuse I needed: http://pelanne.com/twitter