Backend + Frontend Developing + Design | carollei.com

Collaborator: Kenny Le

Twitter Trends Mapper is a tool that lets you visualize Twitter Trends on Google Maps. Check out our project here! Have fun clicking around :)

Twitter Trends.png

Overview

How can we visualize what is trending on Twitter in the United States or around the world? Is there an interactive way to know what’s trending in a city or multiple cities? What does it look like to map out top trends in the United States?

Design Process

Kenny and I had many discussions weeks before our project about how we could add value to two APIs, as the project assignment asked for. We started thinking about what problems we faced or simply what we would be interested in seeing in a project. We arrived at a similar interest – mapping Twitter trends in the US and globally.

Sketches

Screen Shot 2021-11-20 at 12.37.31 PM.png

Development

I took the lead with researching the Twitter API, while Kenny worked with the Google Maps API. I started requesting Twitter calls from GET trends/place and GET trends/available. Respectively, these queries gave me trends at a certain latitude and longitude, and all locations with Twitter trends. To support building our tool with Python, I installed the library tweepy to help me authenticate my API calls.

Once there was a general structure within the backend, we started building our Flask app with React. Eventually, we were working on communicating between the Google Maps component and the Twitter trends component. During this phase, we started maxing out our Twitter API calls with just one click. We spent a long time thinking about ways around it, like creating static files. In the end and to make our deadline, we took out our first functionality – clicking on a US trends and visualizing in which city that trend was trending. On the final day, we deployed our application to Heroku.

Final Video

https://www.youtube.com/embed/HAahmbTK64Q