This is certainly one of the best data viz examples on the block. Tweetping is a real time data visualization of tweets worldwide. Shining dots on the world map show where social media activity is taking place. A panel placed at the bottom of the screen displays various counter widgets providing real time data on total tweet, chart, word, hashtag counts. There are widgets for the whole world as well as separate counters dedicated to South America, North America Europe, Africa and Asia. On the following screenshot which was taken around noon Eastern Time, you can see that most active social media interaction is happening in North America (US and Canada), coastal areas of South America (Brazil, Argentina etc), Europe and South East Asia. It seems that either Australia is asleep or has no interest in tweeting. This real time data visualization is an instance of the data visualization techniques application which is truly capable to wow a viewer.

You can also go to another interesting real time data visualization screen focused on tweets in California . In addition to showing an activity map, this interactive data analytics piece displays an ever changing list of most recent tweets.  They can be clicked taking you to an actual tweet.

The researchers from Northeastern University and Harvard University analyzed data on how Twitter is being used throughout the US. They created a series of cartograms – Pulse of the Nation , depicting the mood change among Americans as inferred from Twitter posts. Happier mood is colored green and becomes redder with Tweets becoming unhappier. The authors used ANEW word list to infer the mood of each Tweet. In this data visualization viewers can glean how the mood of Americans varies throughout the day.

As this data analytics visualization suggests the US residents tend to post happier morning and late evening Tweets. Due to time lag between the west and the east coasts mood variation patterns are delayed by approximately three hours going from New York to Los Angeles.

Northeastern and Harvard researchers also found that there is a variation during week days. As one would expect weekends tend to be the happiest as evidenced by surge in positive Tweets.