You know that famous NASA photo of the earth lit up at night [2]--the one where you can see that the eastern seaboard is gobbling up electricity like there's no tomorrow while most of sub-Saharan Africa is stuck in darkness?

Twitter created a similar kind of visualization using data about where people were tweeting on New Year's Eve. It's amazing how pouring a bunch of data into a map like this produces a certain sense of kinship with our global brethren, as we watch various parts of the world light up 'round midnight.

According to Twitter [3], it was at four seconds past the new year in Japan when tweeters set a new record for overall number of tweets-per-second: 6,939. That more than doubled the previous TPS* record--3,283--when Japan beat Denmark in last year's World Cup. Tweeters on the east coast were working their keyboards at such a furious pace on New Year's that their peak rate alone--of 3,000 tweets per second--almost topped the previous all-time high set at the World Cup.

*Perhaps we now know what those infamous reports [4] in Office Space were about.

[Image: Fireworks: Flickr user Amani Hasan [5]]

E.B. Boyd's coordinates: Twitter [6], email [7].