The geography of Tweets

Give every Twitter user a brush and they will paint you the world — if they geotag their Tweets.

Those of us on the Visual Insights team are obsessed with the patterns that emerge from aggregated Tweets over time. A continuing curiosity is about the geographical shapes that surface in geotagged Tweets. The images we’re sharing here use all of the geo-tagged Tweets since 2009 — billions of them. (Every dot is a Tweet, and the color is the Tweet count.)

I’m especially fond of this view of Europe, because it shows all the maritime traffic from different cities and countries.

Seeing the clarity of the regional images led me to work up images for cities, too. Here are three favorites: Istanbul, Tokyo and New York. I like these in particular because of their uniqueness in data quality, leavened by my own qualitative taste. I hope you enjoy them. You can see more cities on our Flickr page.

Istanbul: 

Tokyo:

New York: