Tweetping is an interesting project from 
Franck Ernewein , which takes a stream of tweets from the Twitter public API and 
places them on a map, counting the words and letters in tweets along the way, and displaying the last mention and hashtag.
Since it takes tweets from the public API, only about 1% of all generated tweets are shown on the map, but this is quite enough to draw a beautiful map.
UPD. You can make a cool screensaver out of this thing using 
WebSaver (OS X) . Option for Windows (I have not tried it myself) - 
here .
Implemented on 
Nodejs + 
Socket.io , 
Processing.js and 
Backbone.js .