trishussey
on
Or maybe I should ask it a little differently...How do your Facebook friends relate to you geographically? Are most of your friends in the same region or spread around? Now imagine if you took the information for about 10 million of Facebook's 500 million users and tried to relate them to each other...that's exactly what an intern at Facebook did. And the result...is mindblowing:
That's only a tennie, tiny version of the whole image (View high-res (3.8MB))—which I recommend you look at—and the the post explaining the process is a data wonks dream. But the really interesting thing isn't what is there, but what isn't.
Look at the image, see the gaps? Like Northnern Canada (but you can certainly pick out all the major Canadian cities) and the (competitor) Basin, Russia, China, central Australia, central Africa. There are two reasons for these gaps. One is a lack of people. Not many people, not many data points. The second is economic, looking at China and Africa especially, the places where there are lots of people, but not a lot of technology. Then there is India, lots of people, also lots and lots of tech.
So while Facebook is looking at this map as showing how well connected we are, I'm looking at this map as showing where we need to do more to help.
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