Maps track Twitter, Flickr users around the world

July 15, 2011 8:08 PM PT

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In the middle of tweeting yet another 140-character-or-less update about your dog, your job and the weather, do you ever wonder who else -- and how many -- other people in the world are doing the same?

Then take a look at the Flickr photo set ‘See something or say something’ created by programmer Eric Fischer, who took data about where people were when they geotagged tweets to Twitter or photos to Flickr, and put them as bright beacons of light on maps.

The result: some genuinely beautiful maps that represent millions of folks around the globe madly tweeting, uploading and contributing information to the insatiable black hole that is the Internet.

What’s not too surprising is what the maps reveal: Cities tend to generate tweets (or at least geotag tweets) more then non-cities; North America and Europe are the two continents with the heaviest Twitter and Flickr usage; and Angelenos like to tweet and use Flickr -- a lot.

‘I used a program that I wrote specifically for that purpose,’ Eric Fischer explained on (what else?) his Twitter account, in response to another Twitter user’s query about how he created his maps.

In addition to worldwide maps, Fischer also built city-specific maps that cover a number of the probable cosmopolitan Twitter hubs of the world -- Los Angeles; New York; London; Tokyo; San Francisco; Singapore; Jakarta, Indonesia; Sao Paolo, Brazil; Mexico City and more.

Twitter announced Friday that 350 billion tweets are now delivered each day.

After the Big Mac and the Internet, there’s probably no American invention as contagious as oversharing.

So take a look. See what you think. And then tweet about it.

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-- Shan Li

Upper image: Global map of geotagged tweets and Flickr photos. Lower image: Los Angeles map of geotagged tweets and Flickr photos. Credit: Eric Fischer via Flickr.

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Shan Li

Shan Li covered the retail and restaurant industries for the Los Angeles Times. She previously reported on the California economy and the technology sector. A Texas native, she graduated from the business school at New York University, where she decided journalism was much more interesting than a job on Wall Street. She left The Times in 2017.