##How it works A tweet makes its way into the system through the watcher application. The watcher listens to the twitter firehose and filters out non-geolocated tweets, and geolocated tweets that are not within the given bounding box. The tweet is inserted into the geodatabase, serialized into a protocol buffer, then broadcast via ZMQ to any listening applications to either be broadcast over websocket, or to be cached for display in the website.
##Components
- lib - Written in Go, this library provides helper functions to serialize/deserialize tweets from the Twitter API stream.
- protobuf - Protocol buffer type and helper functions.
- watcher - Utilizes the library to listen to the Twitter firehose, filter out tweets, insert them into the geodatabase, and broadcast them over ZMQ.
- database - Postgresql/PostGIS database used to store the tweets.
- feed - Listens to the ZMQ feed, deserializes the tweets, and re-broadcasts them over a websocket. Keeps track of the number of connected users.
- website - Serves the static website, as well as the JSON API for tweet statistics.
##TODO List
- Drop dependency on ZMQ to something pure Go
- Drop dependency on protocol buffers
- Fork the twitterstream repo and modify it to use channels/pipelining, and also save the extra step of serializing/deserializing to protocol buffers
- Save URL's in the tweet database
- Convert emoji's in the tweet text to images.