geoTracker is an application that provides a visitor-based snapshot of the global weather in near-real time.

As each visitor enters the application they start on a world map at their location, and their current weather is displayed. Then, they can travel around the world looking at information for other cities in other countries. Most importantly, all user's paths are visible to everyone else!

It combines a light local database with several web-services and APIs from which it pulls data to resolve the user's geographical location and bring in the weather reports for each location.
Users accessing the application are localized using several methods, and are first displayed on the map in the nearest location available for them. Once the user's geographical location is resolved, the application creates a "base node" which will be available for other users to access while this user stays connected to the application, and then searches for the nearest weather report to their geographical location and displays it.
Once the localization proccess is finished, the user can move towards other weather station nodes by loading the available weather stations, and access more detailed statistics by clicking on a node or other users base stations.

I don't know. It all started some time ago when a friend asked me for an application with which he could keep track of the trip around the globe he was about to start. Finished that at that time, but somehow I always wanted to upgrade it a little bit more. Well, this application is now totally different from the one he is using, but I remember when I was working on it how exciting it was to play with information visualization. By the concept of it, information visualization will always be useful as far as that information has any meaning.
Here, I can't really say this is a useful application. In fact, it is probably one of the most clear examples of how to display useful information in the wrong way so that it becomes unuseful. Well, I don't think my point was to create such application.

I've always been very interested in the irony of the fact that today we access almost every information resouce in the internet alone, always unaware of all the people how is accessing the same resource at the same time. It's always the user and the screen and that's it, there's no human presense there. There's no way to know about all the other hundred thousand users accessing amazon.com with me, even less interact with them. I wanted to allow other people to become aware of the nature of the human factor that we don't always see on the web in a clear example where that factor, with the help time and space visualizations, would surface. I wanted to produce a snapshot and visualize the real existence and geographical and cultural diversity that the web represents in a non-verbal fashion. Where are the other users coming from? what time is it there? What's the environment around him like?

I was caught into multiuser content or computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) creation after I read Ambient User Activity on the Web by Collin Moock it was there when I realized about our need to see others, collaborate with them, and follow the trails of their activities in any kind of space. CSCW is nothing new, it has been around since the begining of personal computation, but it had always been accessible through desktop applications. Today, not only can it be accessed through a ubiquotus web browser, but the creation and development of such applications, which used to something only for programming gurus, has become accessible for almost everyone, but so far it has hardly been seen icorporated in the content that at least I browse everyday, which sometimes makes me forget about the tangibility and real existance of all the other people that brings the web alive.