PulseAtlas: Speak Your Mind

I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of a collective cultural consciousness. PulseAtlas was an attempt at capturing that consciousness via a database of geotagged posts (what we might now call “tweets”) and aggregating sentiment in various regions.

Long-stretch goals would be to triage this sentiment with recent events.

It was a personal mega-project that never really reached its full potential, I suppose because I let my college studies get in the way, and because upon release, it got attacked with some pretty ugly spam.

Oddly I never took a live screenshot, but you can see a local test mockup of what it essentially looked like. The UI’s key navigation mechanism was a draggable map leveraging Google’s new Maps API. When dragged, it would aggregate all of the content in the region highlighted.

In hindsight, the project had a few strong headwinds such as language barriers, tech maintenance, spam prevention, and funding to name a few. There was no business blueprint, just an app idea, and a young college kid looking to make a positive dent in the world.