Fusion Tables gem & yes, a twitter example…

I just released a gem to help interactions with fusion tables.

It’s on github, or you can install with a straight:

gem install fusion_tables

The main rationale behind making this gem was to make it easy to upload geospatial data to make quick exploratory maps of large datasets. As an example, here are the results of sampling georeferenced tweets from the live twitter streaming API around several major cities (click the points!):

Tokyo

http://tables.googlelabs.com/embedviz?viz=MAP&q=select+col0%2Ccol1%2Ccol2%2Ccol3%2Ccol4%2Ccol5%2Ccol6%2Ccol7%2Ccol8+from+229966+&h=false&lat=35.68295607559028&lng=139.81063842773438&z=9&l=col5

London

http://tables.googlelabs.com/embedviz?viz=MAP&q=select+col0%2Ccol1%2Ccol2%2Ccol3%2Ccol4%2Ccol5%2Ccol6%2Ccol7%2Ccol8+from+229966+&h=false&lat=51.590722643120145&lng=-0.0933837890625&z=9&l=col5

New York

http://tables.googlelabs.com/embedviz?viz=MAP&q=select+col0%2Ccol1%2Ccol2%2Ccol3%2Ccol4%2Ccol5%2Ccol6%2Ccol7%2Ccol8+from+229966+&h=false&lat=40.79509814519892&lng=-73.81301879882812&z=10&l=col5

Fusion Tables also lets you generate live visualisation from the same data you’re displaying in the map. Here’s a comparison of the counts in all the cities I sampled:

The Fusion Table that drives these maps is available here, & the code I used to generate these examples is also on github.