FRIDAY, May 1, 2009 (Health.com) — What do you get when you cross swine flu with Twitter, the social networking service much loved (and hated) for its rapid-fire 140-character updates known as tweets? No, it’s not a chatty new virus called Switter.

What you get is a map of the United States with the Twitterverse—at least in regards to swine flu—updated in real time. Click on the colored dots, and you can see who’s tweeting about swine flu (some guy in Texas! A lady in Glasgow!) at any given moment. (Added bonus: The site sheds light on Twitter’s popularity around the world; for example, not a lot of Twitter fans in Montana.)

The University of Iowa’s computational epidemiology research group, known as CompEpi, developed the map, and that’s just the beginning, they say. Their aim is to track disease-related content on blogs and other social media sites too, including Facebook, as part of a program known as SWIM (Social Web Information Monitoring) for Health.

The researchers have the Twitter map up and running because they are using updates that are already open to the public. (Anyone can search for swine flu tweets on Twitter’s site). Facebook, on the other hand, is more private. The researchers have asked Facebook for permission to search for health-related terms in status updates, says University of Iowa PhD candidate Alessio Signorini, who built the Twitter map.

There have been more than 10,000 swine-flu related tweets per hour on some days this week, according to the website Mashable, the social media guide.

Signorini says that social media maps could offer a snapshot of the country’s concerns or confusion (or at least among people who use Twitter and Facebook) during outbreaks. For example, many people tweeted that they were no longer going to eat pork, despite the fact that researchers have been working hard to dispel the myth that you can get swine flu, or H1N1, from eating pork.

“If you know there’s something going on like swine flu, you can capture the mood and the feelings and the perceptions of people in various parts of the country,” says Signorini. “Perhaps officials can better address those concerns in that particular zone.”

The ultimate goal is to track health-related comments of all kinds, and see if they are harbingers of disease outbreaks or health-related behavior, in much the same way that Google Flu tracks seasonal flu by looking at search terms such as “coughing” or “fever,” plugged into Google’s search engine. The University of Iowa’s researchers had already developed a map for general health terms, such as “headache,” before the swine flu outbreak.

“We are trying to understand the perception of an outbreak or [something like] the perception of a new vaccine,” says Signorini, who is also the director of search technology at the social search engine OneRiot, which provides some of the data for the project.

Next page: How does it compare to Google Flu?