This article was taken from the January 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
What looks like a satellite-eye view of Europe at night is actually a snapshot of the continent's social habits. Programmer Eric Fischer has mapped our Twitter and Flickr usage by logging geotags from posts: orange dots represent Flickr pictures, blue dots tweets, and white dots indicate where both have been posted.
The California-based mapper used Flickr and Twitter's open application programming inferfaces (API) to obtain the locations. "Everything in the maps comes directly from photo and tweet location data -- there is no base map that they are plotted on top of." He estimates that he went through 400 maps for the Twitter data -- an awful lot of spywork. But did he catch your sneaky tweets?
Hit the gallery for city zoom-ins.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
