Oh yes. We want to see how v1 goes down first but yes, much more planned on top on refining what we already have. Things like visualising hashtags / search terms.
one minor suggestion: I couldn't find any reference to the timezone used to collect/display the data, therefore I was unable to have any deeper insight from your awesome visualization. Could you make that information clear on the visualization or the info page? ;)
We collect the data in the UK (GMT) but the time given in the visualising is the local time of the user. We have a GMT offset on the homepage but not on the player, we'll fix that for v2. Hopefully that clears it up.
Amazing work! I really love seeing the 'explosions' when some news happens in the Netherlands and Switzerland yesterday.
One thing I'm curious about though is if you could make it so that you see the time per time zone. I'm assuming the replay is SF time, but it's hard to figure out when exactly those flash events happened in European countries.
We collect the data in the UK (GMT) but the time given in the visualising is the local time of the user. We have a GMT offset on the homepage but not on the player, we'll fix that for v2. Hopefully that clears it up.
Some comments: Countries are not homogeneous entities, though! Seeing Alaska surge if the east coast is tweeting isn't a as accurate. It would also be nice to have a slider to control time to look at the data from the past.
Don't be so ridiculous. Indonesia is massively distorted, even compared to Japan/Singapore. There is clearly an anomoly in this data, either due to a specific event or a data error.
I say this as someone who has just been to Indonesia (Bali) and not see any evidence of Twitter.
If it's a data error, it's on Twitter's part. We trust the geolocation of their data. However, Indonesia is always bulging. It wouldn't need many global tweets to be large in relation to it's area.
As I said in a previous comment, I've observed this seemingly-out-of-proportion presence of Indonesia on twitter before, since quite a long time. This map confirms those observations. Russia however... ;-)
Not to rain on this but I prefer tweetping.net from last week, although it seems not to be working for me right now. Similar concept, but showed tweets as tiny lights across the world.
Seeing Indonesia bulge like that confirms my own observations of the previous years. Nice to see that. What I have difficulty in believing is the sheer size of Russia's volume, that seems a bit out of place. Rob? Otherwise, fantastic job!
Seeing the smaller countries bulge is very interest. What is out of place about Russia? It's a big place and needs to make up for the vacuum left by China and India.
Granted it's a big place, but if the size on the map is a representation of the volume of tweets, it appears as if 143Mio Russians have a higher volume than 600Mio Europeans (in more or less the same time zones). I had assumed that with internet penetration for Russia estimated at 60Mio (± same as Germany alone), it would not beat the combined internet users of the EU countries. I could be wrong though, just curious.
In this case, you're likely right but the effect is offset by the lack of tweets and huge vacuum in the areas below Russia. The geometry is preserved as much as possible so the vacuum will pull Russia (which at least has some tweets) down to fill.
Aha. So you're saying we can't compare e.g. the tweet volumes of the UK or France with Russia based on the size of the country as depicted on your map? BTW Canada and Greenland seem out of proportion as well. But regardless, I've been hooked on this map since I found out about it this morning. Fascinating.
Effectively, yes. Just because a country is bigger / smaller than another doesn't mean that you can draw immediate conclusions about the relationship between those countries. A bloated country basically means that it's sending proportionately more global tweets than it's geographic area would suggest.
It's a pity the size of a country does not represent the absolute volume of tweets emanating from that country. I understand it would distort the map completely, but it would make it so much more interesting to watch. Something like this, but animated in real time: http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=336
40 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 88.2 ms ] threadone minor suggestion: I couldn't find any reference to the timezone used to collect/display the data, therefore I was unable to have any deeper insight from your awesome visualization. Could you make that information clear on the visualization or the info page? ;)
One thing I'm curious about though is if you could make it so that you see the time per time zone. I'm assuming the replay is SF time, but it's hard to figure out when exactly those flash events happened in European countries.
All in all, great work.
Really nice work!
Any ideas?
I say this as someone who has just been to Indonesia (Bali) and not see any evidence of Twitter.
Indonesia has 4th biggest population in the world. Also, 6th most active country on Twitter (2010).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5137438