The concept's easy enough, but there are two massive caveats to the whole idea - or maybe three if you include not actually being that bothered by the tweets of people who don't know from Adam in the first place - a filter to just show the tweets from people you follow already would have been a nice feature, even if you had to zoom out a little further in order to find content.
The caveats then:
- 90% of tweets aren't geolocated, either because the user wasn't using a device which was accurately positioned or because geolocation hadn't been enabled in the first place, often for privacy reasons.
- Given the first caveat, the chances of many people providing geolocated tweets within a mile or so of your location in the last (say) hour aren't that high - so Peek Around includes tweets as far back as it needs to in order to find content - and this may be back as much as a week, depending on the degree of zoom and where you live. I contend that a tweet from a week ago isn't that relevant anymore...
Those apart though, Peek Around has been implemented well, though there's no multitouch on the maps, so all zooming has to be done using the on-screen icons.
A nice splash screen leads way to a very odd error message - thankfully, ignoring it and pressing on doesn't yield any more oddities...
Centred around your current location, geo-located tweets are found, each represented by a tappable thumbnail. Tap away to read and, if you want, to 'follow' too...
Having followed someone, you can instantly fire off a Twitter 'mention'; as you zoom out, the tweets change slightly, since Peek Around is then able to find more recent tweets from a larger group of people
Each tweet can be viewed using Web if needed - it takes four seconds of so to launch this, but a typical example is shown above left; Along the top of the screen, tweets from your friends are shown, also in thumbnail form, regardless of whether they're geolocated or not. In this sense, Peek Around is acting as a dedicated Twitter client(!)