Twitter City Classification: The Mexican Bean Effect

Over the past few years one of the PhD students I supervise here in CASA has been working on the way cities ‘tick’. Fabian Neuhaus is examining the temporal aspects of global cities and the results are interesting.

One recent piece of work that caught our eye was Fabians classification sample of nine cities ordered from evening to morning based on twitter activity. Some cities seem to be more active in the morning and other in the evening. Dubai and Istanbul for example are clearly more active in the late hours, where on the other end Cairo and Bogota are early birds and tweet a lot more in the morning. The US cities Boston and Atlanta have both a peak in the morning and in the evening.

We liked the way Mexico’s twitter activity is bean shaped:



Image by urbanTick for NCL / timeRose diagram of 24 hours – showing twitter activity in percentage of total tweets by hour of the day. Covers the cities Cairo, Bogota, Mexico City, Manila, Atlanta ,Boston Los Angeles, Istanbul, Dubai.

Similarly there are preferences regarding the weekdays, not all areas tweet the same day. The early week days, Monday and Tuesday are generally less active than the rest of the week. Manila clearly prefers the weekend, where Cairo, Istanbul and Mexico City prefer the end of the week, Thursday and Friday. Dubai and especially Bogota have the least differences between the weekdays with very similar numbers of tweets through out the week.

Google Developer Days: Meet the Google Geo Engineers

Posted by Mano Marks, Google Geo APIs Team

Google Developer Days 2008, a set of one-day developer events, are back and will take place in locations around the world. We’ve designed these events for developers with strong coding backgrounds, so that we can discuss our APIs, developer tools and applications.

We’ll host Google Developer Days in these locations:

  • Yokohama, Japan (June 10)
  • Beijing, China (June 12)
  • Taipei, Taiwan (June 14)
  • Sydney, Australia (June 18)
  • Mexico City, Mexico (June 23)
  • Sao Paulo, Brazil (June 27)
  • London, UK (Sept 16)
  • Paris, France (Sept 18)
  • Munich, Germany (Sept 23)
  • Madrid, Spain (Sept 25)
  • Milan, Italy (Oct 21)
  • Prague, Czech (Oct 23)
  • Moscow, Russia (Oct 28)

If you’re based in the US, we encourage you to come to Google I/O, on May 28-29 in San Francisco.

At Google Developer Day, our Maps and KML engineers will share their inside knowledge on our developer tools and APIs, including the Google Maps API and KML. In many locations we’ll do deep dives into code and conduct hands-on codelabs. If you come to Yokohama and Mexico City, say hi to me and Pamela Fox.

We’ve posted detailed information for our early dates and will be adding more information for other locations soon. If you’re a developer, we encourage you to sign-up for a Google Developer Day at a nearby location. I hope to see you there.