Tweets are fun, but there’s other interesting data that comes along with using the 140 character sharing social network. Ever wonder where your Twitter followers are from? Tweepsmap will tell you exactly that.

The app analyzes the data your followers have entered into their bio and drops all of the information on a Google Map. I was actually pretty surprised by where my followers are from.

Just authorize the app, which takes a few minutes, and you’ll see blue markers spread out all over the world.

Coast to Coast Followers

After I authorized the app with my Twitter account, I was impressed with how fast the data was displayed on a Google Map.

You can zoom in like you would on any other Google Map and see the locations that follow you the most based on Country, State, or City. The app told me that 65% of my followers live in the United States, while most of them are in major U.S. cities like San Francisco and New York City.

While this information won’t really change how I use Twitter, I could see how brands could use this app to help them plan out when to tweet certain content, based on which timezone they’re most popular in. It could also help content providers decide to come up with an international approach to their publishing, if a lot of their followers are outside of English-speaking locations.

Where are most of your Twitter followers from? According to Tweepsmap, a lot of my friends in NYC care about what I have to tweet. Guess I should start getting up earlier in the morning to talk to them, since I live on the other coast.

➤ Tweepsmap

If you’re not familiar with what a food truck is, allow me to school you a bit. Food trucks have become a phenomenon all over the United States, with each truck focusing on a specialty food item.

My favorite food truck happens to be the Grilled Cheese Truck in Los Angeles. The food is amazing, and the truck drives around the city and parks at different spots. Tracking a food truck is almost like hunting down game like a wild bear. OK, maybe not that intense, but you get the idea.

A lot food trucks have their own Twitter accounts and let you know where they are at any given time. However, a Twitter stream isn’t trustworthy when you’re hungry. Important tweets can slip through the cracks, so there has to be a better way.

The better way is an app called TruxMap, which focuses solely on letting you know where the most popular food trucks are and if they’re open.

Stalk that food truck

The app is simply designed with food truck locations pinned on a Google Map. You can pick which city you want to check out, or click all of the available pins on the map.

TruxMap shows you which food trucks are currently open with a green pin, as well as a list of which food trucks will be open tomorrow. Knowing when the food trucks will be open and where can help you plan the lunch on wheels of your dreams. The site gives you all of the information you need to find the truck that you love the most, as well as discover new ones while you’re at it.

If your favorite food truck has a Twitter account, the site even pulls its tweets into the landing page of the truck. Users can submit their own trucks or favorites that haven’t been added as well.

Oh, it’s mobile too

If you’re not at your computer, TruxMap has its own iOS, Android, and mobile web versions. I highly suggest using the iOS or Android version, as the web version is a bit of a mess. The iOS version was perfect though, displaying a lot of data in very limited real estate on a phone.

If you’re in a major city in the United States, there’s a good chance that there’s a famous food truck driving around making something tasty on it. With TruxMap, you’ll now know exactly where they are at all times, and more importantly, if they’re serving food or not.

➤ TruxMap

Glympse, a unique location sharing app announced today that the Android version of its app has been downloaded over one million times. This is a huge milestone for the service, that also offers iOS, Windows Phone, and Blackberry version.

Regarding the milestone, Glympse Co-Founder and CEO Bryan Trussel had this to say:

We’re thrilled that our Android install base has grown over 400 percent in less than a year. It’s a testament to the value users see in our simple and safe approach to location sharing.

The Glympse app allows you to share your real-time location to friends and family for short periods of time. For example, you could send a Glympse alert to your wife to let her know that you’re on your way home. She could then track your movement on a map in real-time from an app or on the web.

It’s not as creepy as it first sounds, it’s actually quite useful if someone wants to ask you to pick up something from a nearby store and sees you’re nowhere near it.

The app doesn’t care about “what” you’re doing, but focuses on the “where”. There aren’t any check-ins or badges with the app, just simple sharing on Twitter and Facebook.

The Android Market has taken a long time to even compare to Apple’s App Store, but numbers like this show developers that if they haven’t ported their iOS app for Android yet, it might be time now. On any platform, 750,000 downloads in less than a year is huge.

In June, the company announced that it raised a $7.5 million series B round, and that it had crossed the one million user barrier.

➤ Glympse

Finding an apartment is probably one of the hardest things to do in life, especially when you are living in a major metropolitan area. Listings go up every few minutes, and are snapped up before you can even make a phone call or email the person who listed the apartment.

Using Craigslist for apartment hunting is great because there are a lot of listings, but it’s not the easiest site to navigate. Furthermore, there are no extra tools to keep track of who you’ve contacted and what the outcome was. Lovely wants to do just that for you with its apartment hunting app.

Sites like Nestio give you tools to track listings you’ve found and contacted, but Lovely has a set of listings for you to browse.

The company is based in San Francisco and has received funding from investors such as: Keith Rabois, Benjamin Ling, Chris Dixon, Ron Conway and Dave McClure, among others.

Finding your next apartment

Once you sign up for Lovely, which you can do using your Facebook account, you’re immediately shown a map of the area that you’re currently in. You can change the area of course, but it’s a place to start. Along the top of the map are sliders to change the price range you’re looking for, as well as how many bedrooms and bathrooms you’d like. This is a quick way to narrow down the search results.

The Lovely site is very lightweight and focuses on the map of apartment listings. Listings are displayed with the time that they were posted, which helps you not miss out on your dream apartment. It’s amazing what a little visual change and user experience cleanup can do to something that can be rather time-consuming and annoying.

You can drag the map around to find the exact area you’re looking for, and blue markers will show available apartments in that area. You’ll also see a list of apartments that fit your criteria on the right hand side.

Keeping track of the apartments you find

This is where Lovely is impressive. The app turns copying and pasting Craigslist links a thing of the past. You can click on a property, find out more information, contact the landlord, and then update the status of your finding to remember later. The set of actions you can take on a listing are: Contacted, Viewing Scheduled, Viewed, Applied. Along with favoriting a property, these things will keep your search organized and detailed.

Having looked for many apartments in cities like Seattle, San Francisco, New York City, and Philadelphia, I can honestly say that Lovely is giving a treatment to apartment hunting, much like Zillow did for house hunting.

I’d like to see more listings though, even though it appears that Lovely is pulling data in directly from Craigslist. The listings seemed sparse at times in areas of San Francisco, where I know that there are a lot of apartments available. Also, you can’t email Craigslist email addresses at this time through the Lovely site, which still causes you to take extra steps. Other than that, Lovely is a great service that will cut out a lot of time during apartment hunting.

I think that Lovely also lends itself perfectly to a mobile app, so seeing that would make me use the service quite a bit more.

One of my favorite things to do online is chat. Real-time chats haven’t been done well since the old aol chatroom days where you could enter a room based on the city you were close to, or an interest that you had.

Since aol, apps like Yobongo have tried to bring chat back with real-time serendipitous chats based on your location.

Today a simple app called “Sirkel” was released.

Set your chat Sirkel

By dragging the slider up and down on the right hand side of Sirkel, you can choose how much of the world you’d like to chat with. Your default circle is set to 3 miles.

You log in with your Facebook account, and the app asks you for your location. Once you get going, it’s kind of neat to see new people pop up on the map.

Chatting through your browser

Since Sirkel kept things simple, there is nothing to download. By clicking the photo above the red dot when someone pops up on the map, a chat is started with them. The chat interface is clean, and lays nicely on top of the map.

I could see leaving Sirkel up on my extra monitor, glancing at it once in a while to see if anyone is active. What we miss on Twitter and Facebook is real-time interactions with people that we don’t know. While this might not be something for everyone, it is a nice way to chat outside of your normal circle.

Considering that you can drag around the map, it will be interesting to see which areas embrace Sirkle, if any. The only downside to Sirkel is that there is no “friends list”, so if I chat with someone I have to remember their name, otherwise it’s likely that we’ll never talk again.

Try chatting outside of your default 3 miles, and see who you meet! Since the app requires you to login with Facebook, Sirkel won’t end up being rowdy or crude, since peoples real names are coming along with the incoming chat requests.

During the Apple keynote announcing the iPhone 4S, there were two mysterious apps announced that would be launched with iOS 5. The first was “Find my Friends“, an app joining a slew of location apps like FourSquare, to keep tabs on where your friends and family are at any given time and vice versa. The second was the Apple “Card” app, which enters the crowded but fruitful physical greeting card market.

I felt like the Apple Card app was very well done, and could have a great shot at making serious revenue for Apple. After a day with “Find my Friends“, I’m not so sure it can find the same success.

First off, the idea of the app is a bit creepy. Unlike foursquare, “Find my Friends” shares your location with whomever you accept a request from, all of the time.

I asked people on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook if they were using the app. I received a handful of responses, and only one from an actual friend that I’d want to share my location with. Here is Jacob Mullins‘ response:

After its announcement, there weren’t any other official mentions from Apple about the app. It just launched ahead of iOS 5 to not much fanfare. After spending some time with “Find my Friends”, it’s clearly not a social network play, as we had thought it might be. It’s a utility app to keep tabs on people, and I honestly don’t think it will catch on.

Here is Apple’s official description of the “Find my Friends” app:

Your friends mark the spot.

Meet up with friends at an outdoor concert. Keep track of the family during a day on the ski slopes. Or see when your out-of-town guest has finally made it past baggage claim. The Find My Friends app is a great way to share your location with people who are important to you.* Friends who share their location with you appear on a map so you can quickly see where they are and what they’re up to. And since Find My Friends works with Contacts and Maps, you can do things like find the quickest route to a surprise party — and avoid running into the birthday girl — all at once.

It sounds social to me.

Adding friends

Unlike most Apple apps, “Find my Friends” is not impressive at all. It’s hard to navigate, and it’s not straightforward on how you would get started with sharing your location, or even who you’d share it with.

Sending requests to friends requires an email from you, which you use your address book to lookup. The only problem is that you have to send the request to the Apple ID email address, and a lot of people I know have different email addresses for theirs. So, you may have to ask someone for their Apple ID email address to even get started. That’s a non-starter for me, honestly. Apple should have just used the brand new Twitter integration to authenticate a username of some sort, or at least tie your accounts together.

After someone sends you a request and you accept, you’re not prompted to follow them back. You have to send them a request, and this could take some time. It’s just not a very fluid user experience at all, even if “Find my Friends” isn’t supposed to be a social network.

Since “Find my Friends” is tied into the address book, you have to make sure that your contacts have photos, or the app will look even more boring.

Seeing where your friends are

Once the both of you have accepted each others request, you can tap on your friend and see their location. In real-time. As in where their phone is right this second. This is just odd, as an app like foursquare prompts you to check-in to a place you think is worthwhile to share with your friends. My exact coordinates in the world aren’t interesting to anyone at all. Well at least not anyone I’d accept a follow request from.

Who would actually use this?

Perhaps the main usage of this app might be for families. I could see a Mom and Dad making their 16-year-old son or daughter turn this app on, so that they can keep tabs on them. Even then, it feels like an invasion of privacy, and a half-baked idea from Apple. Socially speaking, foursquare’s new Radar feature is perfect for this type of “bat signal”. You really have to be close friends with someone to use this app, or even to figure out how to use this app. It even requires you to log-in upon every app open.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but “Find my Friends” just falls flat. It feels undone and feels like something carved out of “Find my Phone” and made to look cool and social. It misses the mark in a big way, though. For the record, I’ve gotten one follow request, from The Next Web writer Matthew Panzarino. Because I asked him to send it to me for this post.

FourSquare hackathon prize winner My Next Trip, created by developer Benjamin Netter, uses FourSquare’s API to help you plan your next big city trip. FourSquare has announced its ‘Global Hackathon’ winners on its blog.

All you have to do is log into the site using your FourSquare credentials and authorize the app. You’re then given a simple search box to type in the city you’re planning on heading to.

Then the magic happens with all of the data FourSquare has collected from our check-in’s, tips, pictures, and to-do lists. The app circles around the notion of spending a weekend (2 days) in a city, and maps out a potential itinerary for you.

This is when things get really cool. Based on where and when your friends checked in, you are given a daily itinerary for each day by My Next Trip. You can see who went there and what tips they left. Even smarter, based on places you’ve gone, it tells you new places to go based on what your friends have done on FourSquare.

This really is the perfect example of what developers can do with an open API for a popular service like FourSquare, which stores tons and tons of data.

Of course My Next Trip is a simple app right now, but it would be even more useful if I could export the itinerary into another format. If it was possible to export, say a Google document by way of email, I would then be able to print it out.

Having previously created maps that only used Flickr geotags and charted racial segregation in the top 40 cities in the United States, Fischer has created a stunning set of maps that chart the locations (geotags) attached to every tweet and Flickr photo.

The maps provide different insights into how both services have been adopted but also what locations are most popular from a photography perspective.

Flickr data is shown in orange and Twitter data is displayed in blue (Click the images for bigger versions). You can see the other countries he has mapped by visiting Fischer’s Flickr page.

World Map

North America

Europe

It seems the number of Twitter users geotagging their tweets is still very low, whereas the rise in smartphone use has helped assist a boom in photo location tagging. Despite this, it still makes for a very beautiful set of images.