New York — A California map enthusiast has created a series of dazzling online “light maps” that tracks Twitter and Flickr usage around the globe. Eric Fischer, a software developer from Oakland, Calif., recently assembled the images by gathering the geo-tagging location posts from the two websites and plotting them on a map.
Have you ever wondered how far-flung people are located when they post on Twitter or take a digital photo? Fischer, countered this question by devising a series of brilliantly lighted maps showing people’s location when they send a Twitter message or upload a photo to Flickr, the photo-sharing Web site.
The data visualization series is dubbed “See something or say something,” on Fischer’s Flickr photo-stream and according to him Twitter feed, uses Twitter and Flickr’s application programming interface, (API) to compute the location and times of each photo or message. He then plots it on a map.
A visualization showing the location of Twitter messages and Flickr photos in New York City. (Visualizations by: Eric Fischer)
No, these are not mere satellite images of how our planet looks under the cover of darkness. Instead, these captivating images give an indication as to the level of our social-networking obsession, with some parts of the world beaming brightly, while others stay lost in the shadows.
The blue dots on the maps describes tweets, while the orange dots symbolizes Flickr pictures. The white dots denotes a combination of Twitter and Flickr activity, he told the Toronto Star in an email.
Fischer said on his Twitter feed that he “used a program that I wrote specifically for the purpose.” He estimates he has made a total of 400 maps for the top Twitter-using cities.
You can imagine from the map above, which shows a visualization of all the city maps, New York comes out blazing, as most Twitter messages are sent from all over the city. Besides, lower Manhattan is a virtual sea of white, while part of the Hudson and the water down by Battery Park are mostly red — and the majority of photos are taken around Manhattan and in areas of the city that contain landmarks, including around the Statue of Liberty, and in the city’s parks.
A map of the United States shows the intensity of image uploads in larger cities.
“I started paying attention to Twitter location data after realizing 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 began watching the location stream and observed that 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,” he added.
Fischer then compiled a computer software to sift through the Flickr and Twitter locations in chronological order and plot a pixel for each one, starting with bright colors for the ones that appeared first and then darker colors 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 created maps for most major U.S. cities, those include New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco, as well as Europe, and one of the entire world. Fischer also said that he uploaded 30 new images of cities to his Flickr feed, including fascinating data visualizations of Paris, London, Tokyo and Jakarta in Asia.
Interestingly, the images took Fischer less than 45 minutes to create — 40 minutes to set up the file data (drawn from Flickr and Twitter APIs) and three minutes to make the image itself. 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.
View the stunning slideshow for some of Fischer’s creations, and check out his Flickr set for all 50 photos here.
All Images: (Eric Fischer)