So, the other day I was introduced to Twitter.com by This Week in Tech. I thought it was a pretty cool idea, and how fascinating it was the people would want to publish what they are doing every second of the day. I am not so inclined to have people peering into my life with that fine granularity, but I am a programmer and was intrigued by the technology. Next thing I found was the Twitter API which lets programmers interact with Twitter data. How cool! After seeing Twittervision I decided to think of a project of my own.
I came up with Realtime Twitter Mosaic Quilt and started watching the updates flow by. It was neat to watch users’ icons be put together in a big patch-work type image. I wondered if they would ever look like pixels in a bigger pictures if they were grouped together in just the right way…
Then it hit me…
What would happen if I could create a photomosaic out of all of these icons? Thus TwitterMosaic was born.
I changed the code of my program to save each users’ icon in a directory. Pretty soon I had a catalog of over 17,000+ unique icons to use for the mosaics.
Here’s an example:
| Step 1: Choose a photo. Here’s a nice pic of me with my saxophone on the beach. | Step 2: Create the mosaic. I used settings that minimized the number of repeated tiles to use as many different icons as possible. |
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| Click to enlarge | Click to enlarge |
Here is a closeup of a section of the full mosaic. In case you can’t tell, it is the saxophone.
So anyway, this seems like an interesting project. In future mosaics I will be able to list all of the usernames that appear in the mosaic. Please note that I only use icons of users that are listed on the public timeline.
If you have ideas for great pictures that you would like to see mosaic’d, please put a link in the comments. I might just do it!
June 12th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
[…] Twitter Mosaic first learned of Twitter from the podcast This Week in Tech. He (or is it she?) thought it was a cool idea and, being a programmer, was intrigued by the technology. You can read how he, or she, got started here. […]
June 13th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
[…] Twitter created a tool to turn 20,000 user profile photos into the building blocks of art. Almost overnight, he turned his new account into a friend haven, going from a request for 20 friends on June 11 to […]
June 16th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
[…] and basically, he creates pretty pictures out of his Twitter followers’ icons. Read his introductory post on TwitterMosaics. You can be part of his TwitterMosaics by adding him as a friend on Twitter. The […]
January 1st, 2009 at 1:26 am
[…] TwitterMosaic takes Twitter members’ icons to create a picture you use. If you have time to spare, this is a pretty good way to discover twitter members by the icons they use. […]
February 25th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Действительно интересный блог. Автор, не желаете ли его продать? Свяжитесь со мной - 7812один. Сергей.
October 5th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Привет. Возникла проблема - прикупил я электродрель на магазин ру
А она сломалась у меня в тот ведь день - гарантии никакой не дали. Просто почта пришла с коробкой, а там все на китайском. Прописал в торговый центр этот, ответили, что обращайтесь в сервис центр, хотя у меня ни документов на руках нет, ничего. Как можно приструнить этот онлайн магазин? Есть ли какие-то компетентные органы, что писать. Куда писать, кому писать. Ошибся, да, нужно было в магазине нормальном купить, но необходимой мне модели просто не было, да и дешевле в интернет-магазине. А вот и уже сижу у разбитого корыта. Подскажите, что делать.