A California software engineer has created online maps tracking Twitter and Flickr use around the world.
Eric Fischer of Oakland, Calif., created the images by taking the geo-tagging location posts from the two websites and plotting them on a map.
He estimates he’s made a total of 400 maps for the top Twitter-using cities.
The blue dots on the maps represent tweets, while the orange dots represent Flickr posts. The white dots represent a combination of Twitter and Flickr posts, he told the Toronto Star in an email.
It takes him about 40 minutes to set up the data files and then about three minutes to make each image.
“I started paying attention to Twitter location data after noticing that many of the tweets that I was reading had locations attached to them, contradicting my previous erroneous assumption that most locations posted to Twitter were repetitive things like foursquare check-ins,” Fischer said.
“Once I started watching the location stream and noticed how many came from cities like Jakarta that were hardly represented at all in the photo location data I had looked at earlier, it seemed compelling to do a direct comparison between the two data sets.”
Fischer wrote a computer program to go through the Flickr and Twitter locations in chronological order and plot a pixel for each one, starting with bright colours for the ones that appeared first and then darker colours for locations that did not make their first appearance until later, he told the Star.
“Everything that appears in these comes directly from the photo and tweet location data — there is no base map that they are plotted on top of.”
Fischer, who posted 30 of his best maps on his Flickr page, says he would be interested in plotting locations of Facebook postings if more detailed location information for the site becomes available.
Currently the only location data that Facebook has released is one map, he said.