New technologies such as global positioning system, smartphone, and social media are changing the way we move around. Traditional transportation research has overwhelmingly emphasized the collection of quantitative data for modeling, without much collection of qualitative data to understand the processes of why and how individuals make their travel choices. We developed a prototype in this project to use realtime GIS and social media (Twitter) to collect, analyze, and display qualitative travel information from individuals. There are two goals in this research project. One is to collect tweets from individuals to speculate the trip purposes of their travels. The prototype developed in this project collects tweets from volunteers and calculates the probabilities of their trip purposes from what they tweet about in Twitter. Another goal of this research is to display tweets on the web through real-time GIS.