Just Landed is a visualization of airline flights by Jer Thorp using Processing. Twitter is searched for passenger’s Tweets containing the phrase “just landed”. Tweets are parsed for a destination, and an home location is taken from that passenger’s profile. Each data point becomes an arc in the animation.

It is a clever use of social media as a new data set. Information which ten years ago would have been available only to large airlines keeping careful records is now published freely online, and by no conscious decision of anyone involved. However, the animation is a bit misleading; many assumptions are made when interpreting the data. (For example, all passengers are assumed to be coming from their home.) The inaccuracy is a compromise made in order to create impressive visuals from informally-gathered data.

More info available on Thorp’s blog.