In recent years, businesses and individuals have used social media platforms to enhance their engagement with people within or close to their physical community: the patrons of a popular restaurant, the customers to a store, or the citizens within a municipality. Geolocating apps like Foursquare and other functions utilizing maps emphasize the users’ interaction with the online community based upon where they are located. But not for long.
As revealed in more recent studies, thanks to Twitter “location plays a much lesser role now in terms of who we talk to, what we talk about, and where we get our information.”
That’s what Kalev Leetrau of the University of Illinois says, who found that after examining heaps of data on the accounts people follow and interact with, most people on Twitter are simultaneously communicating with both people close to them and people on the other end of the globe.
This article published on The Atlantic takes a look at Leetrau’s research, and produces some very interesting maps of Twitter usage and Twitter connections, which are not necessarily contained to their own geographic areas, but rather converge over great distances on similar subjects. Very interesting stuff.