Rob Hamilton's project Twitter Live is a new way to discover and experience world events as they happen. It’s a real-time, geographical, social media search engine providing non-users with a platform to re-engage with Twitter. The premise behind Twitter Live is to leverage the tweet’s geotag and time stamp to deliver real-time, localized content. Presenting the results on a map shifts the paradigm into a more immersive experience, allowing users to explore the world around them as it’s happening— acting as a real-time, geographical, social media, search engine. Scrolling activates a grid view, which presents the content in a more conventional manner for faster browsing.

The ability to set constraints on geographical location, time, popularity, content type and keywords helps to sort through Twitter content at a high level of granularity. This gives users the unique power to:

• Discover popular news, events and venues around them right now
• Visualize real-time content posted at a specific event or location
• Access historic posts made at a particular location or timeframe
• Search a user’s post history by location
• Engage with new users that they might not have otherwise found

-Rob Hamilton

The idea came when we were working on an unrelated project for Twitter and developed further and further as time went on. The style and colours were drawn from the existing branding but we did use larger blocks of color to give it a more playful and fun aesthetic. This was reinforced by the more heavy-handed use of animation that's seen in the video demo.

-Rob Hamilton

The Adobe Suite including Illustrator, Photoshop and After Effects. We started with wireframes and a rapid prototype to initially test the UX. Because it was a personal project the design process wasn't as methodical and we did more experimentation as it slowly evolved into what you see now.

- Rob Hamilton

The feedback has been largely positive so far. When we first presented the concept to the public, we noticed that the full possibilities were not initially apparent to everyone. It takes a while to sink in and really imagine what's possible if a project like this was developed properly. As time went on we kept developing new user cases and finding more uses for the data which has proven how useful it could be.

- Rob Hamilton

About Rob Hamilton

Twofold is an Australian-based company born by two brothers in 2008 with the idea of a niche agency that was able to cover all facets of design. With experience in the graphic design, web development, advertising and film industries, our aim has been to provide a complete design approach across a broad range of mediums. Twofold has won two Awwwards "Site of the Day" awards and has received international recognition for our work. We remain dedicated to producing unique and innovative solutions to our clients across Australia and throughout the world.

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