How to plot your friends tweets by geography

I don't know how I missed it but I never realized that the latest Google Maps updates included support for GeoRSS. Wow, that means you can easily plot RSS feeds according to locations mentioned in feed items (i.e., blog posts, twitter tweets, etc) with a little help from the wonderful Geonames service. For example here's how to plot your friends' tweets -

1. Scroll to the bottom of your twitter homepage (after logging in)
2. Copy the link for the 'RSS' feed at bottom left
3. Visit the Geonames RSS to GeoRSS Converter page and substitute the Reuters URL in the example with the above RSS Feed URL
4. Now plug that new URL in to the Search field on Google Maps and run the search.

Voila, the tweets from your friend which reference locations in the Geonames database are plotted on the map. Note that the results are rarely perfect with duplicates, mis-spellings and accidental matches. And sometimes it can take quite a while for the feed to be processed. But still it's nice to see what places your friends are talking about or visiting, etc. For example here's the plot of my own friends tweets.