[Air-L] the evolution of twitter's global town square and its geographic reach

[kalev leetaru]

Thought many of you would find my latest visualizations of interest,
exploring the geographic evolution of Twitter over the last three years,
finding that it has largely expanded in-place in much of the world and that
its growth has stalled, with new users predominately listening rather than
contributing:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/08/twitter-global-social-media/402415/

This high-resolution zoomable map shows the footprint of all geotagged
tweets in the Streaming API over the last three years:

http://blog.gdeltproject.org/a-zoomable-map-of-the-twitterverse-2012-2014/

This is a high-resolution version of the animated map in the Atlantic piece
that shows the footprint of regular Twitter use by month January 2012 to
December 2014, as seen through the Streaming API:

http://data.gdeltproject.org/blog/twittervis-mastermap-2012-2014/animation-2012-2014-final.gif

In particular, given how much analysis of Twitter and social media in
general these days is facilitated through bulk data mining, I thought many
of you would find the discussion towards the end of the article about the
shift away from the global town square and towards more controlled
distribution of content, with private and ephemeral communications taking
over, as well as the shift towards image and video content that cannot be
as robustly machine processed, of considerable interest in the implications
for the future role of social media in social-scale exploration.

~Kalev
http://blog.gdeltproject.org/
http://kalevleetaru.com/