Sunday, June 23, 2013

map of MoCo tweets show where young adults, affluent people live

Also: Are you wondering why all the trees on Georgia Avenue were cut down last week? It's part of a sidewalk improvement project the county's doing. Georgia will get new sidewalks, street lights, and landscaping, along with newly-replanted trees this fall.

Where we're tweeting in MoCo, by phone.

By now, you've probably seen these maps made by Tom MacWright showing where people around the world use iPhones, Androids and Blackberries based on the location of their tweets. Here's one of Montgomery County, showing iPhones in red and Androids in green. (Apparently, nobody here uses a Blackberry here anymore, except my dad, and he doesn't use Twitter.)

The map looks a lot like my map of where young people in MoCo live. Most of the tweets, regardless of phone, cling to the Red Line, with particularly big clusters around Silver Spring, Bethesda, and Rockville Pike. These are the same areas where the county's 20- and 30-somethings live and hang out. In addition, there's also a cluster at the University of Maryland over in Prince George's County, which of course has a lot young people.

But as the Atlantic Cities points out, they're a pretty good indicator of where affluent people live. And it's no different in Montgomery County. Rockville and Bethesda a sea of red iPhones, but East County and the Upcounty are more mixed, and Takoma-Langley is a forest of green Androids.

What do you notice?

1 comment:

Stuart said...

The original blog post on GGW notes that the map layers iPhone red on top of Android green, so a red spot will obscure a green spot. This means that green indicates presence of Android with lack of iPhone. Red does not mean the opposite.