Twitter map of Europe

The collection of bright dots that make up this map of Europe represent the location of tweets and shared photos by over two million users of the social networking sites Flickr and Twitter.

Eric Fischer, the photographer responsible for producing the map, collected data directly from both sites. The tweets, displayed here as blue dots, represent a period of two months between May and July 2011, and the Flickr images, shown in orange, account for a five year period from 2006 to 2011. The white dots are locations where both interactions have taken place.

Mr Fischer used a homemade computer programme to collate the data, “It's one that I wrote for the purpose, but it's very simple,” he said, “All it does is draw dots in different colours, with the positions diffusing outward slightly for locations that appear multiple times.”