Here’s a really interesting photo, an intern from Facebook wanted to examine the locality of friendships, pulling some data from Facebook he created this image. What’s incredible is that lines don’t represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships. Each line is a friendship between two people, and with enough information these friendships give us a surprisingly accurate map of the world, minus Russia, apparently Facebook isn’t too big over there.
You can read more about how it was made here. Also here is the High Res Version.
Surprisingly accurate map of the world ->
- Only contains South West coast and East coast of Australia
- No northern Canada or any Alaskan borders
- Most of the South East Asian islands no longer exist
- Essentially all of Asia bar India, Japan and bits of South East Asia aren’t visible
- The middle of Africa and Brazil/South America doesn’t exist
- No Greenland either
Seems legit.
Shut up Nic. They said SURPRISINGLY accurate. Not 100% accurate.
It’s accurate enough that I was surprised, so it gets my vote.
Where it is innacurate, I would assume there is a lack of internet penetration, IP geolocation information, or the geolocation is linked to the hub/POP/exchange and doesn’t accurately reflect true location.
In terms of Russia and possibly some other countries, I think a lack of blue lines may also be caused by CG-NAT or other services designed to extend IPv4 addresses that unfortunately mask physical<->virtual ‘net presence.
And some places probably just don’t use Facebook because of language/political/firewall barriers or they have other preferred social networks
