CorpComms Magazine

US webcomic author Randall Munroe has published a new map of online communities for the spring and summer of 2010, in which Facebook monopolises the Northern hemisphere and its parasitic craze game Farmville outstrips the landmass of Twitter.

Landmass on the map represents the volume of daily social activity, in the form of posts, chat etc, recorded over the last two seasons. 

Munroe's depiction of today's Internet landscape supersedes an almost unrecognisable 2007 offering, in which MySpace was the social pioneer, dwarfing Facebook's humble state. It harks back to another age where Yahoo and Windows Live maintained a significant presence in the Icy North.

These days, LinkedIn hugs the corporate bay. An imposing Skype is neighbour to the 'furiously rebranding remnants of AOL', and former Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin is perched at the southernmost tip of Twitter within a stone's throw of the coast of Russia. 

Facebook meanwhile boasts an expansive 'wasteland of unread updates', 'plains of awkwardly public family interactions' and privacy controls that are only accessible through a remote lava pool.

In a disclaimer, Munroe pleads fallibility with a few of his figures: 'Estimates are based on the best numbers I could find but involved a great deal of guesswork, statistical inference, random sampling, non-random sampling, a 20,000-cell spreadsheet, emailing, cajoling, tea-leaf reading, goat sacrifices, and gut instinct.'

Make of it what you will.

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