Twitter Spy Lets You See What People Are Tweeting Right Now

Thousands of people are posting new messages to Twitter every moment, and depending on how many people you're following, you might get more messages than you bargained for. Even so, what makes blogging fun is the ability to peek into the lives of other people.

Twitter Spy gives you a window into what people around the world are posting on Twitter right now. The site updates automatically as new Twitter messages are posted, and a Google Map at the top of the page displays the country from where the message originated with every refresh.

Twitter Spy reminds me a bit of Twistori, another service that updates itself automatically as new Twitter posts come in. The difference is that where Twistori is an experiment in how people use Twitter to express their loves, their wishes, and their beliefs, Twitter Spy makes no such distinction about the types of messages it displays. The site displays the Twitter public feed in real-time and lets you see instantly every message that is posted and where the poster is from on a map.

Perhaps what's most remarkable about Twitter Spy is that it smashes any notion that Twitter and obsessive micro-blogging is somehow an American pastime. In a short sitting, I saw everyone from professionals in the US complaining about their work days, teenagers in Argentina sharing the latest in their lives, a blogger in Portugal confess his blogcrush for another blogger in the US, even a news agency in Sapporo, Japan, posting its headlines to its Twitter account.

If you find an author you know or like, you can pause the feed and start it again whenever, or you can filter the feed for a specific user, country, or even number of followers to get certain kinds of tweets.

Granted, the majority of the messages you'll see at Twitter Spy are the types that you would expect from Twitter: what people are planning for dinner, where they are right now, what movie they're going to see tonight, poorly worded political proclamations, and responses to previous tweets by friends. Even so, it's fascinating to sit and watch all of that information stream by as it's posted in real time and watch the map move from country to country as new messages appear.