Twitter has just unveiled an awesome new data visualization. The premise is simple – they took billions of geotagged tweets and turned them into an elevation map. But the execution is beautiful.
Right now, there are three cities available to explore: San Francisco, New York City, and Istanbul. There are also eight different styles of elevation maps that you can use to view the data: Heat, Fill, Watermark, Clear, Contour, Terrain, Grid, and Dark.
“The mountain ranges you see here are not natural geography but the landscape of Tweets — billions of them, visualized across cities. The peaks represent the places most Tweets are sent from, the troughs the fewest. Explore New York closely and you can pick out the Brooklyn and the Queensboro bridge — even the Staten Island ferry,” says Twitter.
Every map is interactive, and can be toggled from low to high quality and elevation. Check it out here.
This isn’t the first time that Twitter has created a stunning visualization with geotagged tweets. Do yourself a favor and check those out too.