Visualizations : Social network sites by country with internet users and site ranking

Mike, this is very interesting. I knew about Orkut and Brazil and your visualisation here really shows this is a good example of a large country where Social Networking has made a real impact. What I was surprised to see were all the other countries where Social Networking sites rank so highly. Such as, Friendster in Brunei and the Philippines, Facebook in Canada, Norway and the Lebanon but you have Hi5 in Malta (your own home country), Guatemala, Ecuador. I don’t understand this as it’s not a language issue obviously!

This visualization shows the ranking of the social network sites, and the number of internet users in each country divided by continent. Each country is represented by a rectangle. The size of a rectangle is proportional to the number of internet users in that country. The color of a rectangle represents the ranking of the social networking site in the context of all sites accessed in the country. The darker the colour the higher the ranking.

The ranking is calculated using the Inverse Internet Position value. The original data ranked sites using the smallest value, i.e. 1, as the highest ranking figure, however the visualization required the highest ranking figure to have the largest value. To cater for this requirement the Inverse Internet Position was calculated by taking the inverse of the rank and multiplying it by 100. For example, a SN site that ranked 1st in the country list (e.g. Brazil) has a ranking score (IIP) of 100. A site that had a 2nd rank in a country (e.g. France) has a ranking score of 50 etc.

You can interact with the visualization in the following ways:-
    If you hover over one of the rectangles all the data for that rectangle is displayed.
    Bottom Right Slider – This slider lets you adjust the colour scale to make similar shades of the same colour more distinct. Click and drag the brackets to adjust the scale, right-click to restore the initial color map.
    Change the meaning of the size and colour by selecting the data element represented in the combo boxes at the bottom of the visualization.
    Search box – If you type any data value (e.g. country name, SN site name) in the search box all the boxes that reference that data value are highlighted. For example, typing facebook will select all countries where facebook is the most popular site.
  *  Reorder the treemap elements by dragging the variable names at the top of the visualization.

Other visualizations of this data set include:-
     Social Networks World Map
     Social Networks popularity treemap

Since when is the Netherlands in North America?