Tweetmap - Animated maps of real-time tweets using contiguous cartograms | Hacker News Reader

Tweetmap - Animated maps of real-time tweets using contiguous cartograms

tweetmap.it

47 pointsrobhawkes40 comments

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.

All in all, great work.

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.

What service are you using to collect the data? The public Twitter API or another aggregation service?

We use the public Twitter Streaming API, yes :)

I think it is GMT 0 (Rob is UK based) so it will be a few hours ahead of the time.

And thanks for the comments! It's definitely fun to watch.

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.

Thanks for the comments, we'll bear them in mind for v2!

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.

Tweetping is great too, though very different – much like http://onemilliontweetmap.com

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

Check out Tweetpleth if you want more specific tweets http://tweetpleth.herokuapp.com/ like for the superbowl http://i.imgur.com/bzmmJno.png

Very nice, we actually considered using choropleth maps !

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.

Sometimes I wonder if Twitter itself has internal tools to measure/visualize things like this. Kudos, the project looks great!

Thank you! I've been to Twitter and hadn't noticed it but would love to see it there ;)

I'm really suprised by Indonesia's bulging size relative to its landmass. It's far larger than other tourist resorts like Thailand.

Any ideas?

According to HN user pax, in the Tweetping thread:

Indonesia has 4th biggest population in the world. Also, 6th most active country on Twitter (2010).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5137438

Thanks, I did not realise this.

Could the tsunami warning be the reason for it? http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/afp/small-tsunami-hits-solomo...

Are you saying tweets from Asia must be from tourists?

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.

Indonesia does have the fourth largest population of any nation in the world... could that explain it?

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... ;-)

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.

I wonder what public evidence of Twitter looks like besides people playing with their phones.

Very nice work. The trending topics per country would also be informative when shown, but that may be personal.

nice work!

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? ;)

Great work, Noticed this says beta does that mean there is a lot more to come?

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.

Who needs acid when when you can trip on JS and Twitter? ;)

Really nice work!

Haha, exactly. Thanks!

Really nice, congrats!

Thanks!

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