US Twitter Adoption

A visualization showing the adopting of Twitter across the United States. From late March 2006 through the early August 2009, nearly 3.5 million people signed up for twitter. 2.3 million of those users signed up in the 408 cities displayed here.

As users sign up, the blue circles grow and size and turn read then that city reaches a critical mass of users. We defined critical mass as achieving 13.5% of the total number of users that city will gain over the three years.

The graph represents the number of new users signing up each week.

Spatially, Twitter's birthplace can be see (San Francisco, CA), quickly followed by young, tech-savy regions in Cambridge, MA, Silicon Valley, and college towns such as Ann Arbor, MI and Austin, TX.

The largest spike in new users stems from Oprah's endorsement on April 17th, 2009. This is complimented by a similar, though smaller increase in users shortly after during the Iranian protests of 2009 where Twitter and social media became a discussion of hot debate during times of revolution.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Twitter
• Data Visualization
• Adoption
• Diffusion of Innovations
• Spatial Spreading
• contagion
• epidemics
• computational social science

[CoyoteSamuri]

Wow, they made Alaska look really tiny on that map. :/

[jamesonthecrow]

@CoyoteSamuri Its the standard SVG image available on Wikipedia.  Unfortunately I did not even map data from Alaska because of annoyances coding it

[SuperGreenSmartie]

Man, twitter spiked massively in use towards the end. I wonder what prompted such a rise in twitter's use?

[jamesonthecrow]

@SuperGreenSmartie Two things. The first was that Ashton Kutcher went on a campaign to get 1 million followers which ended on Oprah's show with Oprah signing up. The second spike was around the time the Iranian protests of 2009 were generating a lot of press about the roll of social media in civil unrest.

[LittlePikachu]

Keep fighting the good fight North Dakota! Don't fall to the twitter scourge like South Dakota did

[fullersj]

Wow, North Dakota sucks.

[junior214223]

@fullersj no, people just have lives and dont give a shit what other people are doing at all times

[triynizzles]

north dakota here i come!

[TheJashikaa]

Is North Dakota still living under caves?

[mathfreak123]

like a plague

[Almondania]

I don't give a fuck about Twitter.

[KassRedFox]

The infection started really slow ...

[cooljoe494]

America hits puberty around 0:07

[spamviking]

God it's like watching the opening to a zombie film, tracking the spread of the plague.

[slugabedmiz]

@deathlordoo north dakota i think :/ i hope it's a nice place

[deathlordoo]

@slugabedmiz Then that un touched state (sorry for not knowing, I'm Canadian) is the only safe haven