grey canada: global mood clocks

grey canada’s ‘global mood clock’ displays the time and mood of new york

created by advertising agency grey canada, ‘global mood clocks‘ modernizes the classic display of a row of world clocks, integrating it with data scraped from flickr, google, and twitter to provide instant access to the images and trends of a city.

the unusual clock design depicts the hours as twelve concentric circles. along the outmost ring, a black arrow represents the the minute and a small gray arrow updates the second; the locations of both are interpreted as in traditional analog clocks.

each coloured dot along the clock’s interior represents a flickr photograph taken at that moment, its colour determined by those dominant in the image it represents. a mouseover brings up a thumbnail of the image, while a click opens the larger image and a link to the original.

at the bottom of the screen, text displays the city’s top keyword for alternately twitter and google, each linked to the appropriate aggregator page.

the colour of each city’s clock is determined by the latest geo-tagged photo of it that has been uploaded to flickr

although the application involves only simple data scraping, the range of websites sourced provides a dynamic snapshot of a city at any given moment.

the cities presently featured include, in the americas, new york (usa), los angeles (usa), mexico city (mexico), rio de janeiro (brazil), and toronto (canada); and in the rest of the world, london (england), paris (france), tokyo (japan), shanghai (china), moscow (russia), and sydney (australia).

left: rendering of the iPhone app, currently in development right: the coloured dots each represent a flickr photo taken at that moment, and can be viewed with a mouseover or click

‘global mood’ is currently available as an adobe air application for mac and pc, and an iPhone app is in development.

video demonstrating the application in use