KaKoo

Foursquare is parting ways with Google Maps in favor of crowdsourced maps created by the OpenStreetMap project.

Foursquare announced the change in a blog post Wednesday, explaining its decision to make the big API switch. To power the new maps, Foursquare is partnering with MapBox, a startup which calls itself “a beautiful alternative to Google Maps” and uses data from OpenStreetMap.

“As a startup, we also often think about how we can make life easier for other startups,” the Foursquare blog explains.

Foursquare says it chose MapBox for three reasons: its use of OpenStreetMap, which will continue to get better; it allows for design flexibility, so Foursquare can pick fonts and colors to match the rest of the app; and it’s powered by the open-source Leaflet java script library.

During the company’s January hackathon, one engineer proposed the question “What would the world look like if we made our own maps?” and answered it using data from OpenStreetMap, a crowdsourced global atlas.

Foursquare also sited Google Maps’ pricing as a reason they were looking to make a switch.

OpenStreetMap is one of the largest online group projects on the web. Google’s relationship with the project has thus far been tumultuous. For instance, someone with a Google IP address was found to be vandalizing the project, inputting false information in several cities, such as directing one-way street signs in the wrong direction.

What do you think Foursquare’s departure from Google Maps suggests for the future of digital maps? Do you think this decision will pave the way for more new players to gain traction? Let us know in the comments.

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BONUS: Strange and Hilarious Google Street View Sightings

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1. A Fleet at the Ready

Take a minute and think about the gargantuan task of photographing every inch of road in the world. Is your mind blown? Now you may understand why Google needs so many cars.

Click here to view this gallery.

More About: foursquare, geolocation, Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, startsups

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• Become a Fan on Facebook
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• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

What does where we tweet say about how we live and work? That’s one of the questions Oakland-based programmer Eric Fischer hoped to answer with his latest mapping project.

Fischer, a mapping fanatic and artist, is used to displaying vast amounts of information in visually compelling ways. In his latest project, he manages to plot out the motion of New Yorkers using public tweets on Twitter with geotags from May 2011 until January.

The project lays out around 10,000 geotagged tweets and 30,000 point-to-point trips in cities like New York City to plot the flow of people in terms of favored paths. In his map of NYC, seen above, there is a huge ink blot lining Broadway; as we’ve long suspected, it looks like the busy avenue is the backbone of the city.

Using a base map from OpenStreetMap, he drew out transit paths using Tweets. Movements are indicated on the geolocation of a Tweet, with an individual’s start point marked with one geotagged Tweet and ending with the next geotagged Tweet. This is what creates a mass of traffic routes.

“If you just draw lines from the beginning to the ending of each trip, you get a big mess, so the challenge is to come up with more plausible routes in between,” Fischer told Mashable. “That is where the 10,000 individual geotags come in, the most plausible routes are ones that pass closely through places that other people have been known to go.”

Fischer used Dijkstra’s Algorithm to calculate what exactly to map out. For those of who haven’t thought about math since high school algebra, that’s an equation that maps out the shortest path between two points on a graph. For this project, the equation pointed to the relevant paths to map out a city’s most dense corridors.

SEE ALSO: Twitter’s Top Topics and Hashstags of 2011 in Tech, Sports and Entertainment

He has also mapped out the choice transit paths in Chicago, Berkeley-Oakland, East Bay and several other cities.

Fischer has been using social media geotags to display patterns about the world’s cities for years.

In 2010, Fischer took on a huge project to map out race and ethnicity based on U.S. census data. Fischer meticulously used colored dots to represent residents in a city — a dot representing 25 residents of a certain race or ethnicity.

The map colored coded populations of people living in the city and those sprawled out in the outer boroughs. The color code stands as this “Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Yellow is Other.” There are 109 maps total a part of the project published on Flickr.

“My interest in social media is as a huge source of volunteered information about where different people spend their time, the language they use in talking about those places, and the other people they communicate with,” Fischer said.
 
The Twitter social space is of special interest to Fischer because of the vast information from more than 200 million Tweeters. He has also used Flickr’s geotags to map out the world’s photographic activity by locals versus tourists. Fischer found cities like Las Vegas seem to be photographed mostly by tourists.

For the future, Fischer is looking to map out other patterns of residents in major U.S. and world cities, but will attempt to figure out how to shorten the amount of time it takes to map out 10,000 pieces of tweet-based information.

“I need to figure out how to make it faster so that it doesn’t take so long to make each one,” he said, though it’s worth noting his view of a long time is two hours for each city map.

Let us know what you think about this artful way of laying out social media-derived data in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Eric Fischer

More About: flickr, geolocation, geotagging, infographics, OpenStreetMap, Social Media, Twitter

For more Social Media coverage:

• Follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Social Media channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

What does where we tweet say about how we live and work? That’s one of the questions Oakland-based programmer Eric Fischer hoped to answer with his latest mapping project.

Fischer, a mapping fanatic and artist, is used to displaying vast amounts of information in visually compelling ways. In his latest project, he manages to plot out the motion of New Yorkers using public tweets on Twitter with geotags from May 2011 until January.

The project lays out around 10,000 geotagged tweets and 30,000 point-to-point trips in cities like New York City to plot the flow of people in terms of favored paths. In his map of NYC, seen above, there is a huge ink blot lining Broadway; as we’ve long suspected, it looks like the busy avenue is the backbone of the city.

Using a base map from OpenStreetMap, he drew out transit paths using Tweets. Movements are indicated on the geolocation of a Tweet, with an individual’s start point marked with one geotagged Tweet and ending with the next geotagged Tweet. This is what creates a mass of traffic routes.

“If you just draw lines from the beginning to the ending of each trip, you get a big mess, so the challenge is to come up with more plausible routes in between,” Fischer told Mashable. “That is where the 10,000 individual geotags come in, the most plausible routes are ones that pass closely through places that other people have been known to go.”

Fischer used Dijkstra’s Algorithm to calculate what exactly to map out. For those of who haven’t thought about math since high school algebra, that’s an equation that maps out the shortest path between two points on a graph. For this project, the equation pointed to the relevant paths to map out a city’s most dense corridors.

SEE ALSO: Twitter’s Top Topics and Hashstags of 2011 in Tech, Sports and Entertainment

He has also mapped out the choice transit paths in Chicago, Berkeley-Oakland, East Bay and several other cities.

Fischer has been using social media geotags to display patterns about the world’s cities for years.

In 2010, Fischer took on a huge project to map out race and ethnicity based on U.S. census data. Fischer meticulously used colored dots to represent residents in a city — a dot representing 25 residents of a certain race or ethnicity.

The map colored coded populations of people living in the city and those sprawled out in the outer boroughs. The color code stands as this “Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Yellow is Other.” There are 109 maps total a part of the project published on Flickr.

“My interest in social media is as a huge source of volunteered information about where different people spend their time, the language they use in talking about those places, and the other people they communicate with,” Fischer said.
 
The Twitter social space is of special interest to Fischer because of the vast information from more than 200 million Tweeters. He has also used Flickr’s geotags to map out the world’s photographic activity by locals versus tourists. Fischer found cities like Las Vegas seem to be photographed mostly by tourists.

For the future, Fischer is looking to map out other patterns of residents in major U.S. and world cities, but will attempt to figure out how to shorten the amount of time it takes to map out 10,000 pieces of tweet-based information.

“I need to figure out how to make it faster so that it doesn’t take so long to make each one,” he said, though it’s worth noting his view of a long time is two hours for each city map.

Let us know what you think about this artful way of laying out social media-derived data in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Eric Fischer

More About: flickr, geolocation, geotagging, infographics, OpenStreetMap, Social Media, trending, Twitter

For more Social Media coverage:

• Follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Social Media channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

What does where we tweet say about how we live and work? That’s one of the questions Oakland-based programmer Eric Fischer hoped to answer with his latest mapping project.

Fischer, a mapping fanatic and artist, is used to displaying vast amounts of information in visually compelling ways. In his latest project, he manages to plot out the motion of New Yorkers using public tweets on Twitter with geotags from May 2011 until January.

The project lays out around 10,000 geotagged tweets and 30,000 point-to-point trips in cities like New York City to plot the flow of people in terms of favored paths. In his map of NYC, seen above, there is a huge ink blot lining Broadway; as we’ve long suspected, it looks like the busy avenue is the backbone of the city.

Using a base map from OpenStreetMap, he drew out transit paths using Tweets. Movements are indicated on the geolocation of a Tweet, with an individual’s start point marked with one geotagged Tweet and ending with the next geotagged Tweet. This is what creates a mass of traffic routes.

“If you just draw lines from the beginning to the ending of each trip, you get a big mess, so the challenge is to come up with more plausible routes in between,” Fischer told Mashable. “That is where the 10,000 individual geotags come in, the most plausible routes are ones that pass closely through places that other people have been known to go.”

Fischer used Dijkstra’s Algorithm to calculate what exactly to map out. For those of who haven’t thought about math since high school algebra, that’s an equation that maps out the shortest path between two points on a graph. For this project, the equation pointed to the relevant paths to map out a city’s most dense corridors.

SEE ALSO: Twitter’s Top Topics and Hashstags of 2011 in Tech, Sports and Entertainment

He has also mapped out the choice transit paths in Chicago, Berkeley-Oakland, East Bay and several other cities.

Fischer has been using social media geotags to display patterns about the world’s cities for years.

In 2010, Fischer took on a huge project to map out race and ethnicity based on U.S. census data. Fischer meticulously used colored dots to represent residents in a city — a dot representing 25 residents of a certain race or ethnicity.

The map colored coded populations of people living in the city and those sprawled out in the outer boroughs. The color code stands as this “Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Yellow is Other.” There are 109 maps total a part of the project published on Flickr.

“My interest in social media is as a huge source of volunteered information about where different people spend their time, the language they use in talking about those places, and the other people they communicate with,” Fischer said.
 
The Twitter social space is of special interest to Fischer because of the vast information from more than 200 million Tweeters. He has also used Flickr’s geotags to map out the world’s photographic activity by locals versus tourists. Fischer found cities like Las Vegas seem to be photographed mostly by tourists.

For the future, Fischer is looking to map out other patterns of residents in major U.S. and world cities, but will attempt to figure out how to shorten the amount of time it takes to map out 10,000 pieces of tweet-based information.

“I need to figure out how to make it faster so that it doesn’t take so long to make each one,” he said, though it’s worth noting his view of a long time is two hours for each city map.

Let us know what you think about this artful way of laying out social media-derived data in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Eric Fischer

More About: flickr, geolocation, geotagging, infographics, OpenStreetMap, Social Media, Twitter

For more Social Media coverage:

• Follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Social Media channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

What does where we tweet say about how we live and work? That’s one of the questions Oakland-based programmer Eric Fischer hoped to answer with his latest mapping project.

Fischer, a mapping fanatic and artist, is used to displaying vast amounts of information in visually compelling ways. In his latest project, he manages to plot out the motion of New Yorkers using public tweets on Twitter with geotags from May 2011 until January.

The project lays out around 10,000 geotagged tweets and 30,000 point-to-point trips in cities like New York City to plot the flow of people in terms of favored paths. In his map of NYC, seen above, there is a huge ink blot lining Broadway; as we’ve long suspected, it looks like the busy avenue is the backbone of the city.

Using a base map from OpenStreetMap, he drew out transit paths using Tweets. Movements are indicated on the geolocation of a Tweet, with an individual’s start point marked with one geotagged Tweet and ending with the next geotagged Tweet. This is what creates a mass of traffic routes.

“If you just draw lines from the beginning to the ending of each trip, you get a big mess, so the challenge is to come up with more plausible routes in between,” Fischer told Mashable. “That is where the 10,000 individual geotags come in, the most plausible routes are ones that pass closely through places that other people have been known to go.”

Fischer used Dijkstra’s Algorithm to calculate what exactly to map out. For those of who haven’t thought about math since high school algebra, that’s an equation that maps out the shortest path between two points on a graph. For this project, the equation pointed to the relevant paths to map out a city’s most dense corridors.

SEE ALSO: Twitter’s Top Topics and Hashstags of 2011 in Tech, Sports and Entertainment

He has also mapped out the choice transit paths in Chicago, Berkeley-Oakland, East Bay and several other cities.

Fischer has been using social media geotags to display patterns about the world’s cities for years.

In 2010, Fischer took on a huge project to map out race and ethnicity based on U.S. census data. Fischer meticulously used colored dots to represent residents in a city — a dot representing 25 residents of a certain race or ethnicity.

The map colored coded populations of people living in the city and those sprawled out in the outer boroughs. The color code stands as this “Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Yellow is Other.” There are 109 maps total a part of the project published on Flickr.

“My interest in social media is as a huge source of volunteered information about where different people spend their time, the language they use in talking about those places, and the other people they communicate with,” Fischer said.
 
The Twitter social space is of special interest to Fischer because of the vast information from more than 200 million Tweeters. He has also used Flickr’s geotags to map out the world’s photographic activity by locals versus tourists. Fischer found cities like Las Vegas seem to be photographed mostly by tourists.

For the future, Fischer is looking to map out other patterns of residents in major U.S. and world cities, but will attempt to figure out how to shorten the amount of time it takes to map out 10,000 pieces of tweet-based information.

“I need to figure out how to make it faster so that it doesn’t take so long to make each one,” he said, though it’s worth noting his view of a long time is two hours for each city map.

Let us know what you think about this artful way of laying out social media-derived data in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Eric Fischer

More About: flickr, geolocation, geotagging, infographics, OpenStreetMap, Social Media, Twitter

For more Social Media coverage:

• Follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Social Media channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

What does where we tweet say about how we live and work? That’s one of the questions Oakland-based programmer Eric Fischer hoped to answer with his latest mapping project.

Fischer, a mapping fanatic and artist, is used to displaying vast amounts of information in visually compelling ways. In his latest project, he manages to plot out the motion of New Yorkers using public tweets on Twitter with geotags from May 2011 until January.

The project lays out around 10,000 geotagged tweets and 30,000 point-to-point trips in cities like New York City to plot the flow of people in terms of favored paths. In his map of NYC, seen above, there is a huge ink blot lining Broadway; as we’ve long suspected, it looks like the busy avenue is the backbone of the city.

Using a base map from OpenStreetMap, he drew out transit paths using Tweets. Movements are indicated on the geolocation of a Tweet, with an individual’s start point marked with one geotagged Tweet and ending with the next geotagged Tweet. This is what creates a mass of traffic routes.

“If you just draw lines from the beginning to the ending of each trip, you get a big mess, so the challenge is to come up with more plausible routes in between,” Fischer told Mashable. “That is where the 10,000 individual geotags come in, the most plausible routes are ones that pass closely through places that other people have been known to go.”

Fischer used Dijkstra’s Algorithm to calculate what exactly to map out. For those of who haven’t thought about math since high school algebra, that’s an equation that maps out the shortest path between two points on a graph. For this project, the equation pointed to the relevant paths to map out a city’s most dense corridors.

SEE ALSO: Twitter’s Top Topics and Hashstags of 2011 in Tech, Sports and Entertainment

He has also mapped out the choice transit paths in Chicago, Berkeley-Oakland, East Bay and several other cities.

Fischer has been using social media geotags to display patterns about the world’s cities for years.

In 2010, Fischer took on a huge project to map out race and ethnicity based on U.S. census data. Fischer meticulously used colored dots to represent residents in a city — a dot representing 25 residents of a certain race or ethnicity.

The map colored coded populations of people living in the city and those sprawled out in the outer boroughs. The color code stands as this “Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Yellow is Other.” There are 109 maps total a part of the project published on Flickr.

“My interest in social media is as a huge source of volunteered information about where different people spend their time, the language they use in talking about those places, and the other people they communicate with,” Fischer said.
 
The Twitter social space is of special interest to Fischer because of the vast information from more than 200 million Tweeters. He has also used Flickr’s geotags to map out the world’s photographic activity by locals versus tourists. Fischer found cities like Las Vegas seem to be photographed mostly by tourists.

For the future, Fischer is looking to map out other patterns of residents in major U.S. and world cities, but will attempt to figure out how to shorten the amount of time it takes to map out 10,000 pieces of tweet-based information.

“I need to figure out how to make it faster so that it doesn’t take so long to make each one,” he said, though it’s worth noting his view of a long time is two hours for each city map.

Let us know what you think about this artful way of laying out social media-derived data in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Eric Fischer

More About: flickr, geolocation, geotagging, infographics, OpenStreetMap, Social Media, Twitter

For more Social Media coverage:

• Follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Social Media channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

What does where we tweet say about how we live and work? That’s one of the questions Oakland-based programmer Eric Fischer hoped to answer with his latest mapping project.

Fischer, a mapping fanatic and artist, is used to displaying vast amounts of information in visually compelling ways. In his latest project, he manages to plot out the motion of New Yorkers using public tweets on Twitter with geotags from May 2011 until January.

The project lays out around 10,000 geotagged tweets and 30,000 point-to-point trips in cities like New York City to plot the flow of people in terms of favored paths. In his map of NYC, seen above, there is a huge ink blot lining Broadway; as we’ve long suspected, it looks like the busy avenue is the backbone of the city.

Using a base map from OpenStreetMap, he drew out transit paths using Tweets. Movements are indicated on the geolocation of a Tweet, with an individual’s start point marked with one geotagged Tweet and ending with the next geotagged Tweet. This is what creates a mass of traffic routes.

“If you just draw lines from the beginning to the ending of each trip, you get a big mess, so the challenge is to come up with more plausible routes in between,” Fischer told Mashable. “That is where the 10,000 individual geotags come in, the most plausible routes are ones that pass closely through places that other people have been known to go.”

Fischer used Dijkstra’s Algorithm to calculate what exactly to map out. For those of who haven’t thought about math since high school algebra, that’s an equation that maps out the shortest path between two points on a graph. For this project, the equation pointed to the relevant paths to map out a city’s most dense corridors.

SEE ALSO: Twitter’s Top Topics and Hashstags of 2011 in Tech, Sports and Entertainment

He has also mapped out the choice transit paths in Chicago, Berkeley-Oakland, East Bay and several other cities.

Fischer has been using social media geotags to display patterns about the world’s cities for years.

In 2010, Fischer took on a huge project to map out race and ethnicity based on U.S. census data. Fischer meticulously used colored dots to represent residents in a city — a dot representing 25 residents of a certain race or ethnicity.

The map colored coded populations of people living in the city and those sprawled out in the outer boroughs. The color code stands as this “Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Yellow is Other.” There are 109 maps total a part of the project published on Flickr.

“My interest in social media is as a huge source of volunteered information about where different people spend their time, the language they use in talking about those places, and the other people they communicate with,” Fischer said.
 
The Twitter social space is of special interest to Fischer because of the vast information from more than 200 million Tweeters. He has also used Flickr’s geotags to map out the world’s photographic activity by locals versus tourists. Fischer found cities like Las Vegas seem to be photographed mostly by tourists.

For the future, Fischer is looking to map out other patterns of residents in major U.S. and world cities, but will attempt to figure out how to shorten the amount of time it takes to map out 10,000 pieces of tweet-based information.

“I need to figure out how to make it faster so that it doesn’t take so long to make each one,” he said, though it’s worth noting his view of a long time is two hours for each city map.

Let us know what you think about this artful way of laying out social media-derived data in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Eric Fischer

More About: flickr, geolocation, geotagging, infographics, OpenStreetMap, Social Media, Twitter

For more Social Media coverage:

• Follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Social Media channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

What does where we tweet say about how we live and work? That’s one of the questions Oakland-based programmer Eric Fischer hoped to answer with his latest mapping project.

Fischer, a mapping fanatic and artist, is used to displaying vast amounts of information in visually compelling ways. In his latest project, he manages to plot out the motion of New Yorkers using public tweets on Twitter with geotags from May 2011 until January.

The project lays out around 10,000 geotagged tweets and 30,000 point-to-point trips in cities like New York City to plot the flow of people in terms of favored paths. In his map of NYC, seen above, there is a huge ink blot lining Broadway; as we’ve long suspected, it looks like the busy avenue is the backbone of the city.

Using a base map from OpenStreetMap, he drew out transit paths using Tweets. Movements are indicated on the geolocation of a Tweet, with an individual’s start point marked with one geotagged Tweet and ending with the next geotagged Tweet. This is what creates a mass of traffic routes.

“If you just draw lines from the beginning to the ending of each trip, you get a big mess, so the challenge is to come up with more plausible routes in between,” Fischer told Mashable. “That is where the 10,000 individual geotags come in, the most plausible routes are ones that pass closely through places that other people have been known to go.”

Fischer used Dijkstra’s Algorithm to calculate what exactly to map out. For those of who haven’t thought about math since high school algebra, that’s an equation that maps out the shortest path between two points on a graph. For this project, the equation pointed to the relevant paths to map out a city’s most dense corridors.

SEE ALSO: Twitter’s Top Topics and Hashstags of 2011 in Tech, Sports and Entertainment

He has also mapped out the choice transit paths in Chicago, Berkeley-Oakland, East Bay and several other cities.

Fischer has been using social media geotags to display patterns about the world’s cities for years.

In 2010, Fischer took on a huge project to map out race and ethnicity based on U.S. census data. Fischer meticulously used colored dots to represent residents in a city — a dot representing 25 residents of a certain race or ethnicity.

The map colored coded populations of people living in the city and those sprawled out in the outer boroughs. The color code stands as this “Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Yellow is Other.” There are 109 maps total a part of the project published on Flickr.

“My interest in social media is as a huge source of volunteered information about where different people spend their time, the language they use in talking about those places, and the other people they communicate with,” Fischer said.
 
The Twitter social space is of special interest to Fischer because of the vast information from more than 200 million Tweeters. He has also used Flickr’s geotags to map out the world’s photographic activity by locals versus tourists. Fischer found cities like Las Vegas seem to be photographed mostly by tourists.

For the future, Fischer is looking to map out other patterns of residents in major U.S. and world cities, but will attempt to figure out how to shorten the amount of time it takes to map out 10,000 pieces of tweet-based information.

“I need to figure out how to make it faster so that it doesn’t take so long to make each one,” he said, though it’s worth noting his view of a long time is two hours for each city map.

Let us know what you think about this artful way of laying out social media-derived data in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Eric Fischer

More About: flickr, geolocation, geotagging, infographics, OpenStreetMap, Social Media, Twitter

For more Social Media coverage:

• Follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Social Media channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

What does where we tweet say about how we live and work? That’s one of the questions Oakland-based programmer Eric Fischer hoped to answer with his latest mapping project.

Fischer, a mapping fanatic and artist, is used to displaying vast amounts of information in visually compelling ways. In his latest project, he manages to plot out the motion of New Yorkers using public tweets on Twitter with geotags from May 2011 until January.

The project lays out around 10,000 geotagged tweets and 30,000 point-to-point trips in cities like New York City to plot the flow of people in terms of favored paths. In his map of NYC, seen above, there is a huge ink blot lining Broadway; as we’ve long suspected, it looks like the busy avenue is the backbone of the city.

Using a base map from OpenStreetMap, he drew out transit paths using Tweets. Movements are indicated on the geolocation of a Tweet, with an individual’s start point marked with one geotagged Tweet and ending with the next geotagged Tweet. This is what creates a mass of traffic routes.

“If you just draw lines from the beginning to the ending of each trip, you get a big mess, so the challenge is to come up with more plausible routes in between,” Fischer told Mashable. “That is where the 10,000 individual geotags come in, the most plausible routes are ones that pass closely through places that other people have been known to go.”

Fischer used Dijkstra’s Algorithm to calculate what exactly to map out. For those of who haven’t thought about math since high school algebra, that’s an equation that maps out the shortest path between two points on a graph. For this project, the equation pointed to the relevant paths to map out a city’s most dense corridors.

SEE ALSO: Twitter’s Top Topics and Hashstags of 2011 in Tech, Sports and Entertainment

He has also mapped out the choice transit paths in Chicago, Berkeley-Oakland, East Bay and several other cities.

Fischer has been using social media geotags to display patterns about the world’s cities for years.

In 2010, Fischer took on a huge project to map out race and ethnicity based on U.S. census data. Fischer meticulously used colored dots to represent residents in a city — a dot representing 25 residents of a certain race or ethnicity.

The map colored coded populations of people living in the city and those sprawled out in the outer boroughs. The color code stands as this “Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Yellow is Other.” There are 109 maps total a part of the project published on Flickr.

“My interest in social media is as a huge source of volunteered information about where different people spend their time, the language they use in talking about those places, and the other people they communicate with,” Fischer said.
 
The Twitter social space is of special interest to Fischer because of the vast information from more than 200 million Tweeters. He has also used Flickr’s geotags to map out the world’s photographic activity by locals versus tourists. Fischer found cities like Las Vegas seem to be photographed mostly by tourists.

For the future, Fischer is looking to map out other patterns of residents in major U.S. and world cities, but will attempt to figure out how to shorten the amount of time it takes to map out 10,000 pieces of tweet-based information.

“I need to figure out how to make it faster so that it doesn’t take so long to make each one,” he said, though it’s worth noting his view of a long time is two hours for each city map.

Let us know what you think about this artful way of laying out social media-derived data in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Eric Fischer

More About: flickr, geolocation, geotagging, infographics, OpenStreetMap, Social Media, Twitter

For more Social Media coverage:

• Follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Social Media channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad