FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Design

Glowing, Geotagged Tweets From Osaka, Bangkok, And More Make Big Data Beautiful

Now you can see where people around the world are sub-tweeting their ex's.
Images via MapBox

Geotag and open-source tool experts, Mapbox, make your hashtags and 140 inklings about brunch a little more interesting. The team posted visualizations of cities that pulse with Twitter data, depicting where people are tweeting the most in hubs like Osaka, Mexico City, Bangkok, and more.

In case you forgot, New Yorkers are not the only one sub-tweeting their ex-girlfriends. Though to be fair, Mapbox, has already shared New York Twitter geotag data with the public and even split up tourist info from local tags:

Advertisement

The team, comprised of Tom MacWright, Eric Gunderson, and Eric Fischer, were given every geotagged tweet from September 2011 (a whooping 3 billion) from data team Gnip, and together they used open source tools to turn the information into interfaces that make the social media technology a little less abstract.

New York City

Bankok

Gunderson wrote in a blog post that there's a significant level of geographic overlap among tweets, so they wrote a new open-source tool to turn the 2.7 billion overlapping datapoints into 280 million unique locations.

Istanbul

This big data visualization reminds us of other cool geotagging projects The Creators Project has highlighted in the past. For example, #tweetscape turned German Twitter users into multi-sensory stimuli by marking them with a lightning bolt on a map and simultaneously triggering a short tune.

Mexico City

ProjectInvisible Cities, on the other hand, included topographical map of Twitter and Flickr activity for New York City. In this work, white nodes on a map signified real-time social media activity, while data density was projected in 3D form to look like hills and mountain ranges.

Singapore Mapbox may be the easiest visualized representation to digest, though. You can still infer thoughts about social media use and socio-demographic info in various cities, but more simply: it makes cities look like beating hearts, pulsing with technological life. Or, well, pulsing with passive aggressive sub-tweets.

@zachsokol