Tangible Twitter Search: A Multiuser Multitouch Tabletop Interface

Social Media has become an integral part of our society that is no longer limited to private exchange and contacts but has also grown into business and commercial application and even culture and learning. Nevertheless, the representation of information is a crucial part and is currently dominated by chronological representations that can be found in Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and the like. Although these interfaces are usually offering dedicated filtering mechanisms and sorting, there is a potential for using information from social media platforms in various contexts that have different requirements than a chronological order, such as reviewing posts about social events (e.g. concerts, museum exhibitions or festivals) which can be distributed over a longer period. In this paper we present a prototype and some use case examples of a search term based, multi-user enabled visualisation of twitter postings.