Back in the early days of Twitter, Portland was often one of the more prominent towns on the platform. Getting topics to trend was a regular occurrence. And using the service to spread news and weather was commonplace.
So when I heard that Eric Fischer at Mapbox had created a map of more than 6 billion geotagged tweets, I was excited to see how Portland looked.
The entire map is embedded below. Or you can view visualize Portland geotagged tweets.
I’ve been tracking geotagged tweets from Twitter’s public API for the last three and a half years. There are about 10 million public geotagged tweets every day, which is about 120 per second, up from about 3 million a day when I first started watching. The accumulated history adds up to nearly three terabytes of compressed JSON and is growing by four gigabytes a day. And here is what those 6,341,973,478 tweets look like on a map, at any scale you want.
For more information on how this was created, see Making the most detailed tweet map ever.