By tapping into this stream of morning wakeup times, bus schedules, calls to prayer, ETAs, "OMG, it's already [time]!" and other time-related tweets, a new site called Chirpclock has created a clock that posts time using tweets.
Using the Twitter API, Chirpclock searches the social network for whatever is the current time on the user's computer. Users in different time zones, in other words, see different clocks. The site displays one result from its queries at a time, and the time tweets flash across the screen in two-second intervals.
Since launching the site Wednesday afternoon, creator Mike Bodge says there hasn't been a minute for which the site could not find a tweet.
"There's so much volume on Twitter that you could probably search for anything at any minute, and there would be someone talking about it," says Bodge, who created Chirpclock in about two days "while everyone else was at South by Southwest."
Bodge runs his own digital agency, but he spends his free time creating amusing visualizations. Last year, he made a site that uses footage from webcams scattered around New York City to post the average color of the sky every five minutes.
Chirpclock is similarly intriguing. It makes the fact that there are more than 200 million Tweets per day more tangible.
"When you see it all together, it’s like, wow, there’s a lot of people on Twitter that I’ll never come across, they’ll never come across me, we'll never retweet each other," he says, "but since they’re all talking about the time, I'm seeing them together."
