The Well conferencing system used to have a series of topics called “Status”; finally on the Web, on steroids (or Google).

“David Troy, a software developer in Maryland, has created a Web site called Twittervision that superimposes this public timeline on a Google map. Every few seconds, a tweet appears and vanishes somewhere on the globe. It is an absorbing spectacle: a global vision of the human race’s quotidian thoughts and activities, or at least of that portion of the species who twitter.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/business/yourmoney/22stream.html?_r=1&oref=slogin