A Most Excellent Mashup
Andy Wick and Elena Furman from the AIM Host team have created a mashup of Google Earth and AIM that is truly cool. It shows you in real time new IM conversations. It uses live data from the AIM system (respecting privacy) and draws a line between the city where the originator sits and the receiver sits. So if I sent you an IM, there would be a line between Oakton, VA and wherever you are sitting now. You can use the features of Google Earth to zoom in and out and see any part of the world. Give it a try. You will be impressed.
Check it out here.
Very interesting!
I’m curious where the IP -> Geocoding lookups are being done. 18.*.*.* addresses (the network I am on) are all physically in Cambridge, MA, but this wasn’t showing anything there.
I tried signing on a couple high-rank ScreenNames, but nothing new seemed to show up over the next 10 minutes anywhere in MA.
Similarly, trying from a different address in the same IP range didn’t cause anything new to show up either.
Oops, Cambridge is there, everything works fine down to the city level.
I misinterpreted ‘count’ to indicate Buddy Rank…seeing 16K people online in a single city (Boston) at this time of day is pretty crazy.
We use the IP of the connection we see. In some cases, all the IPs from a company or ISP may show up as located at their data center rather than the location of your PC. I’m glad it is working for you in Cambridge.