A World Of Tweets

Frog Design have come up with a nifty, real-time visualization of geolocated tweets around the world.

A World of Tweets is all about playing with geography and bits of information. Simply put, A World of Tweets shows you where people are tweeting at from the past hour. The more tweets there are from a specific region, the "hotter" or redder it becomes.

A World Of Tweets

This continuous collection of Twitter statuses also allows for the presentation of other interesting visuals as well as statistical and historical data about the tweeting world we live in.

Through the activity of Twitter users it is possible to tailor a new map of the world that evolves during the day according to the time zones and the spreading of mobile technologies.

A Social World

The daily social activity of various social networking sites
Original Source: XKCD.com

Download a copy of the large version here.

As the article at DailyInfographic remarks: "Not surprisingly, the ubiquitous Facebook sprawls across the top of the map, dwarfing its neighbors, and leading to the “Northern Wasteland of Unread Updates.” A place I have been, many times."

The Growth of Social Media

A couple of interesting observations can be made from this chart, recently release by Search Engine Journal:

• 75% of brand “likes” are coming from advertisements 
• Mobile access to Facebook accounts has grown 200% in a year.
• The 50-64 Age demographic have recorded the sharpest rise in growth over two years
• 80% of companies use social media for recruitment and 95% of them use LinkedIn

Click on the Infographic to see the larger version

Hair Of The Dot. Dog

Dot.BMW, Dot.dog and Dot.Singapore may soon become three of many new domains now that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) the nonprofit Internet coordinating body has approved the development.

The only catch is that a  person, company or government wanting to secure such a domain-name suffix will need to fork out the princely sum of $185,000 to make their application and this will put such an initiative beyond the budgets of many SME's.

This however is not the end of the cost.  For having secured the domain, there is then an annual fee to Icann of about $25,000, among other costs such as hosting and domain management

Registering a new extension for your company is an excellent branding idea but the cost of doing so and maintaining it will be prohibitive for most.

So the Dot.Com party is finally a thing of the past and we have entered (to quote the WSJ) the age of Dot. Anything.

Will this development make it easier for the consumer, or more difficult as they search through an ever expanding array of domains for the company or service that they seek?

Going to the Dot.Doctor will never be easier.

Read All About It

While a plethora of new domains might make finding relevant information more of a challenge, a new service from the Newseum allows a reader to feel the pulse of the world through an interactive map of newspaper front pages.

Front pages of the World - Flash version

Through a special agreement with more than 800 newspapers worldwide, the Newseum displays these front pages each day on its website. The front pages are in their original and unedited form and are viewable in either the Flash or Bing Beta versions.  Personally I prefer the latter (see below) as the pop-up windows are easier to navigate.

Bing Beta version

Related articles

• Brand name Top Level Domains coming (zdnet.com)
• ICANN Approves Generic Top-Level Domains: New Era of Innovation or A Flood of Spam? (readwriteweb.com)