my name is mwd

I blogged the other day about the very cool Meebo Maps, which showed where Meebo’s users were at a given time. The logical thing to do with this was to watch the world over 24 hours, so I put together this simple movie that shows what happened over a single day.

I hope that movie embedding worked for you :) I hope Meebo don’t mind this use of their data (Apologies to those using Linux, as it’s a QT movie, and I didn’t want to You Tube it without Meebo’s permission).

The movie isn’t great quality – iMovie’s export options are a bit limited for this sort of thing, but you get the idea I think. If you bear in mind I started around midday in the UK you can see the day/night cycle on places like Europe and US quite clearly. There’s a few other interesting things to note from this though.

The first thing is how little of the world lights up. I think it’s possible far too easy for those of us with connectivity to forget that a lot of the world doesn’t live that way; in fact the majority by land mass doesn’t. Whilst there are a lot of pressing things that the developing world requires, we at Ndiyo hope to give an opportunity for those in parts of the world where a single computer costs way too much for a single person to afford.

Other interesting things are looking at where in Australia people live, and where in Asia lights up – like Malaysia and the Philippines – and where doesn’t – like China. The later is probably a limitation on who uses Meebo rather than who has connectivity.