Who’s tweeting in Antarctica???

Published on Waltzing Matilda

Who’s tweeting in Antarctica? Hardly anyone apparently. After trying “The one million tweet map” you do wonder if the four tweets from Antarctica come from some super-developed penguins or some researchers or explorers tweeting in – 70° temperatures.

It turns out that the few tweets from the region come from a strange account called @googuns_staging which posts nothing but strings of letters and numbers, like b39e65fa00000000, every 5 minutes. Apparently, this has been going on since 2009 creating over 350,000 tweets. I’m not sure what’s behind it. Some have pointed at international espionage or maybe it is just somebody having fun.

Anyway, this introduces what “The one million tweet map” can do. TOMTM is powered by Maptimize and maps the last geolocalized tweets delivered by the Twitter stream API. The map is updated in real-time and displays the latest one million tweets that have been posted since your login. Each second, about 20 new tweets are added and the 20 oldest tweets are removed to keep the same number of points on the map.

One cool feature is the ability to zoom in on a cluster, which splits into smaller clusters until, once you’ve zoomed all the way in, you’re presented with a single tweet which you can click on and read. That way, you can explore your own neighbourhood or visit some remote village in Greenland to see what’s going on there.

You have the option to turn on the heatmap view and monitor the “temperature” of tweeting volumes worldwide. It’s quite interesting for instance to see how Twitter is popular in certain West African countries or in the Arab Gulf in comparison to North African or Central Asian countries .

Furthermore, this tool gives you the most used hashtags worldwide in real-time. The screenshot below was taken on a Friday and obviously #FF seems the most used hashtag of the day.

TOMTM is a good tool to have a quick snapshot of the world’s tweeting volumes and discover interesting Twitter facts. It is certainly interesting for mapping reports when close geographical details are needed. Definitely worth a look!