This morning Chile was rocked by a devastating 8.8 earthquake that claimed hundreds of lives. The earthquake was extensively mapped by our community, some of the most notable maps are embedded below. If you’re looking to pitch in and help the relief effort in Chile, you can find more info here.

Huge 8.8 quake hits central Chile by StarTribune

Aftershocks in Chile 27-Feb-2010 by InfoSismos

Earthquake Twitter Map

In addition, our maps were used to illustrate new articles on Chicago Sun-Times, StarTribune and Trouw.nl.

After two weeks of intensive testing, the Twitter Search template is ready for release! It is now easier than ever to create interactive maps with real-time Twitter feeds. You can display all tweets from a location or filter results by a specific keyword.

Here is how it works:

Pretty easy! Create your first Twitter map right now.

Here is what people are saying about weather in Vancouver. Check it out in full screen (button in top-right corner).

As with all of our other templates, this one supports all of the standard features of UMapper. You can add custom icons, audio overlays, images and all other previously-released features.

The Twitter search is created using Tweetr ActionScript 3.0 library.

We’ve added [trendy] Google Buzz to the list of sharing options for UMapper maps. If you have a Google Buzz account, simply navigate to the map view page and click Buzz It in the bottom right corner. As with Facebook and Twitter, the details of the shared map will be added to Google Buzz stream. Buzz it!

As we prepare to officially release our Twitter Search template, some of our test maps are getting excellent publicity. The Vancouver Olympics Twitter map has been mentioned on several blogs and has generated quite a bit of buzz on Twitter. Here is the map:

The Twitter template is on its way to being released next week. Thanks to all beta testers for their helpful feedback and to these wonderful bloggers for spreading the word:

• Google Maps Mania: Twitter, Google Maps and the Winter Olympics
• Mibazaar: Winter Olympic tweets from Vancouver and elsewhere
• GIS User: UMapper See People Tweeting from the Vancouver 2010 Olympics on a map
• Jamie Forrest: Vancouver Olympics / Twitter Mashup
• LandkarnenBLOG: Olympia: UMapper zeigt Twitter Meldungen zu Olympia an

Did we miss anyone?

Our new Twitter Search template is ready for public testing. If you would like to get your hands on the template, send us a quick email with a description of your website and we will add the Twitter Search template (shown below) to your account.

The template displays Twitter messages sent from a given area. In addition to location, search results can be filtered by a keyword. In this example, we display search results for ‘Saints’ in New Orleans.

Please post your comments in the Twitter Search discussion on our Facebook page. We look forward to hearing from you.

p.s. This template works very similar to our Live Weather Map. Watch this video to get an idea.