Beautiful maps generated using geotagged Tweets from around the world

Twitter’s Visual Insights team has an interesting job: deliver data collected from everyone who sends out Tweets and turn it into a cool visual representation. Its latest project takes the geotagging data – the optional latitude and longitude data you can add when you send a Tweet – and maps out where Tweets have been sent from. Since geotagging was first introduced in 2009, billions of geotagged Tweets have been sent out, which translates into some pretty cool maps that the Visual Insights team has released.

As Visual Insights Manager Miguel Rios explains in a blog post, every dot you see on the image is a Tweet and the colour shows the Tweet count for that location.

SLIDESHOW: Tweet Density Maps

As Geek.com points out, you can make some really interesting observations using these maps. In San Francisco, for example, you can see loads of Tweets sent out over bodies of water, sent when people were either in a boat or a plane. It’s also fascinating to see where Tweets are coming from in Canada, extending all the way into the Northwest Territories, with enough density to show up on the North American map. It’s a great way to get a sense of where Twitter users not only live and work, but also the common routes they travel to navigate their region or country.

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You can see all of the visualizations created by the Visual Insights team in its Flickr album.

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