Cartoonist maps world of social networking

LONDON - A cartoonist has created a map which imagines websites as countries and shows their size based on how popular they are.

Randall Munroe, a university graduate from Massachusetts, US, has used his imagined world map to represent the levels of social activity in online communities such as Facebook, Twitter and Skype.

The land mass of each mythical country named after a website equates to the popularity of that site, showing effectively how social activity is spread throughout the internet.

Munroe based his Map of Online Communities on statistical information, including website hits and the number of members each community had over the Summer of 2010, reports the Telegraph.

Email dominates the map and unsurprisingly Facebook features prominently, as does Twitter and Skype.

The map does throw up some surprises. Myspace, once one of the most popular social networking sites, is barely visible, only slightly larger than LinkedIn, a site which aims to connect people through business profiles.

Farmville and Happy Farm sit prominently while YouTube, the video-sharing website, is a good-sized island.

The most surprising inclusion for many is QQ, a Chinese instant messaging service which has more than 100 million users but is virtually unheard of in the west.

Munroe said: “This update map uses size to represent total social activity in a community - that is, how much talking, playing, sharing or other socialising happens there. This meant some comparing of apples and oranges, but I did my best to be consistent.”