Watch the video in HD in Vimeo.
First look at Twitter’s Streaming API from Flash. The service returns real time tweets, which are then compared to specified search terms. If a match is found, the tweet is plotted on a simple 3D globe in red, otherwise, in white. The experiment searches the twitter database on users that have enabled geo-location only. It would be much more effective if more people had this setting enabled. It can also search in specific areas… The Streaming API looks great so far!
3D wise it’s not too special, just a sphere with an Earth texture, a normal map and a specular map. Longitude and latitude positions from the service are converted into cartesian coordinates and expanded to produce opposite line segment points. The points are contained in Away3D’s SegmentSet, which shares one set of buffers for about 16000 lines, so, there is little limit to the amount of tweets that can be plotted.
PS: Sorry that there is no live demo yet. I don’t seem to be able to connect to twitter outside from a web server yet 
. Any help on that would be appreciated!
Very nice demo!