We have been working on the next big release of CartoDB for some months now. Affectionately given the title, 2.1, this release is really a major step forward for the platform. We have added in tons of new features, design and usability improvements, and most of all, multilayer support. Multilayer support, in combination with new filters, new style wizards, and CartoDB’s built in SQL and CartoCSS capabilities will give you the ability to make some of the web’s most amazing maps.

In our second post this week about Twitter visualizations, we want to show you a cool visualization of tweets from throughout the NBA Finals visualized using CartoDB. Like the Wimbledon map we showed you yesterday, this map makes use of a neat set of ~70,000 geospatially tagged tweets. The tweets are visualized in two distinct ways. In the first map, all tweets are displayed by location and with a color according to the team the tweet identifies with,

The last days we have been working with the Twitter team on a visualization about the impact of Wimbledon on the popular social network. You can read more about the data in their blog post. Twitter contains one of the most interesting geospatial datasets one the web; every time someone tweets and shares their location, new geospatial data is published. This allows others track everything from the popularity of specific topics within a region to the dynamics of how viral topics spread around the world.

We often get questions and support tickets from people that want to upload files to CartoDB without having to do it through the browser. For these people, we needed a file API, where they could point a script or application to upload a file and have it turned into a table. Today, we wanted to show you our Import API and a few helpful little tools that you can use to get started.

As many of you already know, we have been working on the 2.1 version of CartoDB for several months now. In the upcoming release, we are incorporating multi-layer support, new visualization wizards, and a new and improved way to publish and save your visualizations.

Today we hear from Steven Romalewski in a guest post detailing work on the “Who Represents Me: NYC” project. Steven has created several projects using CartoDB, generally focused on topics in the NYC area. We think his work is interesting to people anywhere though! We’re happy to let him share his work with you here.

A handful of developers using CartoDB have begun to build tools that incorporate CartoDB data and the Leaflet.draw plugin. It is a pretty neat combination of tools, that allow anyone to create polygon editing interfaces on top of their datasets. It also lets you build custom data management interfaces on top of a powerful geospatial database. We used it for a fun demo at the recent FOSS4G-NA meeting and it gave us the chance to see how it could work. The library is pretty straightforward, though it does take a basic grasp of GeoJSON, JavaScript, and the gang of usual suspects.