What with something like 3% of the world’s population now confirmed as active users and around 370 million-odd tweets sent each and every day, Twitter is home to a pretty vast amount of information. But what can all of that data tell us about the world we live in?

Quite a lot, as it happens, especially when you look at the geographic side of things. Of particular interest is what all of those tweets can show us, as seen in a new paper published in the peer-reviewed First Monday online journal that depicts nothing less than a picture of the world from the perspective of Twitter.

Led by Kalev H. Leetaru, the paper’s authors accessed the data via Twitter’s decahose feed that collects exactly 10% of all the tweets made in the world. Covering a roughly six week period from October 23 to November 30 last year, the data encompasses around one and a half billion tweets from approximately 71.2 million users, amounting to something like 2.8 TB of data per day. Of these tweets, very few actually contained geographic data. Nevertheless, the ones that did provide extremely vast detail, more than enough to come up with some extremely vivid illustrations like the one we’re about to see.

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*Note: click on the images for high resolution

But wait, is something missing? Yep, that’d be China of course. Despite having the world’s largest population, it barely even figures on the world Twitter map because the service is of course banned from that country. There are some Twitterers in China, but those that do so have to use VPNs or some other type of proxy technology to get around the block, and these often mask their location, hence we have a big, black hole in Eastern Asia.

For the rest of the world though, the Twitter map is pretty much indicative of the world’s population, with the most densely populated countries showing up as having lots more Twitter users. It’s more or less the same as those satellite images of the world at night time with only the electric lights to illuminate it.

Also illuminating is the remarkable detail in the maps. This map of the US, for example, clearly depicts some of that country’s major road and transportation networks.

The image is comparable with NASA’s Visible Earth City Lights imagery, as shown in the next image which overlays the two on top of each other. NASA’s imagery measures urbanization and the amount of electricity used in different parts of the world, and the Twitter image corresponds almost like-for-like, with the exception of China and Iran (which also blocks Twitter).

Also of interest is the language in which tweets are composed, and the next image is a wonderful depiction of how multi-cultural certain parts of the world are becoming. Note the penetration of other languages in predominantly English-speaking countries like the US and the UK. And look at Europe – isn’t she just beautiful?

The next image looks only at tweets made in English, giving us an vivid picture of just how predominant the “global” language has become. As expected the US and the UK are like beacons of light, but the penetration of English into parts of Asia and South America is particularly revealing. Whoever would have guessed that Japan, Thailand, Indonesia and Brazil have so many English speakers?

Also worth looking at is the geography of retweets, which gives us an idea of global connections. It might come as a surprise, but it seems our tweets have little regard for geographical boundaries. Some of the relationships between nations are quite interesting, for example the strong connections between certain cities in the US, or the UK’s strong links to Brazil. According to the authors, the average distance between retweets is 749 miles:

If you have a good hour or so to sit through and read it, you’ll find tons more interesting findings in the paper. New York City ranks number one for tweets according to their origin, but surprisingly Jakarta, Indonesia is where you’ll find the most tweets containing geographic data. And as for the most influential tweeters out there? You won’t find them in the US, instead you’ll have to look to Indonesia, Western Europe, Central America and Africa.