I was reading a post on Gizmodo (http://tiny.cc/h9gjk), the artical took a fictional world map where instead of France and Germany sharing a border Facebook and Twitter do. The map shown here highlights not only the dominance of Facebook in the social networking circles but also highlights the many other sites which people call home. Who would have thought Habbo had a larger user base than Twitter, and who just had to Google Habbo because you didn't know what it was, I certainly had to. The map also helps to demonstrate the changing landscape of social networks with early sites such as Yahoo and AOL and even the mighty Microsoft being reduced to bit players.
The map to some extent is already a cartogram as the geographic size of each 'country' is determined by the number of users subscribed to the particular network. However I thought it might be interesting to create an actual cartogram of users by real world country.
I chose Facebook partly because it is the largest network and also because it was relatively easy to get hold of the user by country statistics. Facebakers provide recent statistics for a wide range of Facebook based questions from user profiles to most viewed pages. I downloaded the latest user statistics which are updated on a daily basis, a bit of excel processing later and I joined the data to a world dataset and ran the cartogram process.
The result below, demonstrates the dominance of Facebook in the Western world with the US prominent and in particular the UK in Europe. Third world counties where computer access is limited and social networking is less important to life shrink to almost nothing, Central Africa has all but disappeared. Restrictions in China means that Facebook has never found a foothold but in Indonesia it has a massive following resulting in a very skewed geography.
