Some of you may recall earlier in the year when we looked at the Eric Fischer’s wonderful visualization of Twitter languages, and how countries in Asia were represented. Eric has recently completed another visualization, and this time it shows not just who is talking, but also with whom they are speaking.
According to Eric, “Green is physical movement from place to place; purple is @replies from someone in one location to someone in another; combining to white where there is both.” In the map above, you can can see the global flow of tweets, which is focused on a number of global hubs. In the west most activity is focused on the US coasts, and in western Europe with much flow between the two. But lets take a closer look at Asia for a moment (I hope Eric is ok with us cropping and annotating his map!) to see what’s going on there.
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Indonesia just might represent the most intense activity spot on this map, lit up with purple and white more than any other region I think. Indeed we saw no shortage of Twitter-related headlines coming from the nation over the past year, with everything from protests to terrorism threats to ghosts making an appearance in 2011. Expect Indonesia to keep growing as a Twitter nation too, as mobile penetration grows. Already 87 percent of Indonesian tweets are reportedly from mobile devices.
The map of Japan is also a point of interest in Eric’s visualization, as it’s the area with the most green, indicating ‘physical movement from place to place.’ I’m not quite clear on what to make of this representation, as there’s green all the way up the eastern coast, which is where the earthquake hit. I thought that much of this would be messages sent in the wake of the 3/11 earthquake, but it seems the data was sampled between May 17 and September 1, 2011. Eric also seems confused by what’s happening in Japan:
Whatever is going on off the east coast of Japan is definitely strange. Lots of people on boats? Or errors in the data? Could be confusion between Tokyo Datum and WGS84 coordinates.
Regardless, it’s a pretty interesting visualization. And if anything, we can take away that Asia is certainly talking to the rest of the world on Twitter, and we hope that conversation continues to grow more in the future.
Check out more of Eric’s work over on his Flickr page.
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