Twitter, as a service, lends itself to all sorts of, well, goofy ideas. But this is an idea so elegantly simple it verges on brilliance: Scanning Twitter for all the f**ks given, and showing exactly where they’re given.
It’s fairly straightforward: As somebody swears on Twitter, a little bomb icon appears on the map over the location they’re tweeting from. Click the icon, and you can see who tweeted it and what they said.
But why make it? Martin Gringras, the man behind the map, explains that he was just looking to develop his coding skills, and apparently tracking the profanity distribution of Twitter users was the best way to do it.
It is accidentally fascinating, though. The bombs collect in real time and you can actually track tweets, early on, as they bounce from user to user. And you learn other things, too, that you may not have before. For example, you quickly discover that countries that have another primary language will still drop F-bombs; they’ll just use it as a hashtag instead of an actual word. Similarly, people still seem to be upset over Yeezus in Cleveland, for some reason.
It’s not going to change the world, but hey, it’s funny. Consider your coding project a success, Mr. Gringras.