I don't see where the hypocrisy is in creating an application that maps the location of tweets with the "F-word" and then not writing the word "fuck" anywhere. It isn't the intention to advocate cursing. The goal of the application for me was to work in a new framework/language set on something that some people may find entertaining. Writing fuck on the about page or not doesn't really change the message, I didn't intentionally do either it just isn't the vernacular I use to write about my development work.
That is correct, it uses both the coordinates and places fields (see more about those here https://dev.twitter.com/docs/platform-objects/tweets ). There were actually substantially less before adding the code to handle "place". Most tweets that are tagged with a place and not specific coordinates use a bounding box which I've handled by just dropping the pin in the middle of the box.
In it's current implementation, where it has no persistent data, I would 100% agree, however if you added a data store for it I'm sure that there are analytics you could implement that might be useful.
You might try out http://mapd.csail.mit.edu - it uses GPUs to run the queries in real time - there are 80 million tweets now but we're doing a billion for a demo with Nvidia. Here is a link to a heatmap of the f-bomb with a bar chart of the states that say it the most (by % of total words). http://mapd.it/19uTSVG
Right now it only tracks the actual string "fuck", if you check out the code on gh, https://github.com/mgingras/fBomb , by changing line 67 of coffeeApp.coffee, "stream = Twitter.stream 'statuses/filter', {track:'fuck'}" , you could track anything you wanted.
I'm actually planning on writing this since the change would be trivial. But that also makes it less appealing to do haha. I will see when I can get it done.
