Which is the most popular social network site in your country?
The numbers speak for themselves – Social Networking Sites are popular all over the world (These stats are taken from the data extracted for this exercise).
- In 90 (79%) countries a major social networking site features in the top 10 sites of that country.
- In 19 of these countries, the social networking site is the highest ranking site in the country – ranking higher than any search engine.
- From a sample of 116 countries only 1 (Taiwan) didn’t include a popular social networking site in the list of the top 100 websites.
The popularity of social networking sites is no surprise, and several statistics (1, 2, 3) have been published about the major social networking sites like facebook and myspace. There are however few reports on the use of these sites by geographic region. The only geographic distributions I came across were from Comscore, the Social Network Sites paper published in JCMC, and ValleyWag .
Using the Many Eyes platform I created three different visualizations of the most popular SN sites used in each country. The data used for determining the country popularity was collected from Alexa ratings. For more information about the data see – About alexa traffic rankings. For more information about the purpose of these visualizations see the about page.
You can interact with the visualization by clicking on the applet below. To access this visualization in the many eyes site click here.
The world map is a colour coded map with each social networking site represented in a different colour.
To interact with the world map you can either select any number of the sites from the site list on the left, or else (shift or control) click on the country. If you want to comment on certain characteristics of the map data, you can select the countries or sites you want to comment on, and then write a comment with the selection active. When other people view your comment, the map selection you made when you wrote the comment, is displayed alongside your comment. To zoom in or out, click on the top left controls, or use the mouse scrollbar. More information about World Maps.
You can interact with the visualization by clicking on the applet below. To access this visualization in the many eyes site click here.
This visualization shows the ranking of the social network sites and the number of internet users in each country, divided by continent. Each country is represented by a rectangle. The size of a rectangle is proportional to the number of internet users in that country. The color of a rectangle represents the ranking of the social networking site in the context of all sites accessed in the country. The darker the colour the higher the ranking. More information about treemaps
The ranking is calculated using the Inverse Internet Position score. The original data ranked sites using the smallest value, i.e. 1, as the highest ranking figure, however the visualization required the highest ranking figure to have the largest value. To cater for this requirement the Inverse Internet Position was calculated by taking the inverse of the rank and multiplying it by 100. For example, a SN site that ranked 1st in the country list (e.g. Brazil) has a ranking score (IIP) of 100. A site that had a 2nd rank in a country (e.g. France) has a ranking score of 50 etc.
You can interact with the visualization in the following ways:-
- If you hover over one of the rectangles all the data for that rectangle is displayed.
- Bottom Right Slider - This slider lets you adjust the colour scale to make similar shades of the same colour more distinct. Click and drag the brackets to adjust the scale, right-click to restore the initial color map.
- Change the meaning of the size and colour by selecting the data element represented in the combo boxes at the bottom of the visualization.
- Search box - If you type any data value (e.g. country name, SN site name) in the search box all the boxes that reference that data value are highlighted. For example, typing facebook will select all countries where facebook is the most popular site.
- Reorder the treemap elements by dragging the variable names at the top of the visualization.
You can interact with the visualization by clicking on the applet below. To access this visualization in the many eyes site click here.
This visualization shows a rectangular table display of the data divided by social networking and country. The colour of the rectangles shows the social networking site grouping. The size of the rectangles does not have any associated meaning.
You can reorder the treemap hierarchy by dragging the ordering at top of the visualization display.
Which visual representation of the data set do you prefer, and why? Do you think that one of the displays is superior to the others? Can you think of other different ways to present this data graphically? The aim of this exercise is to display some interesting data using Many Eyes and stimulate discussions on the different visualizations and data presented.
If you’d like to voice your comments, comment on the specific visualization by clicking the comment link in the respective visualization. The data used to generate the results is freely accessible on the Many Eyes site. You can use the uploaded data to create other visualizations in Many Eyes. After all, if you reply with a picture it’s like you’re writing a thousand words.