Here’s a fun fact for you: 66% of Twitter users don’t list an actual location on their profile. Most users, it seems, opt for something more imaginative either because they want to protect their privacy or just for fun. Interestingly, some of these users still publish location data with each Tweet. This infographic uses that location data and matches the places to the user-assigned nicknames. The results are surprising, and revealing. “Gotham,” makes sense and “Hotlanta” is quite apt, but “The Miami of Canada?” I guess that makes sense.

Read on below for the full map.

Public transit is great, but it can be nervewracking not knowing when your bus or train is going to arrive. To help alleviate that sinking feeling you get at the bus stop in a strange neighborhood at 2 AM when it seems like your bus will never come, Google is now bringing live transit updates and delay notifications to Google Maps and their mobile Android App.

So far, the service is only available in six cities that have partnered with Google: Boston, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, Madrid, and Turin. On maps of these areas, users can click or top on the icons for public transit stations. A window will pop up listing the lines, estimated arrival times, and any service alerts that might affect the station. Google plans on adding the transit information of more cities in the future, but hasn’t given any word on how quickly other cities will rollout nor what cities will be involved.

While certainly useful in its desktop form, the app seems even more valuable on a mobile platform. Coupled with their recent addition of traffic jam avoidance technology, Google is bringing a huge amount of transit data it has access to bear on its Android platform. While Android’s open architecture has always been a major selling point, it’s useful apps like this that take advantage of Google’s efforts to organize the world’s information that could give it an even greater competitive edge.

(Google via Techmeme)

Trulia, the company behind the maps that visualize apartment listings and residential rent: buy index, has tackled the task of visualizing another key issue for people looking to relocate: crime. Trulia has launched Crime Maps, a service that pulls statistics from local police departments around the country to create a heat map that shows which neighborhoods have the highest crime rates.

The maps, which currently include cities from San Diego, CA to Kalamazoo, MI and dozens in between, show street intersections or specific neighborhoods where crimes took place. Searchers can evaluate the crime statistics based on what type of crime occurred or which days are the most crime heavy. Locations are clickable, giving Facebook users a chance to chime in with comments about certain locations or neighborhoods. Crime trend analysis can be as accurate as up-to-the minute, but some refer to the last week, or at least data from the last month.

So, before you sign a lease or contract on your next place, checking Crime Maps could help you make sure your dream home isn’t right in the middle of a burgeoning criminal hot spot.

(via Lifehacker)

Many navigation systems can tell you how long it will take to reach your destination, and some can even help you get there. But Mapnificent goes one step further. Instead of telling you how long it take to reach your destination, it shows you destinations that you can reach in a pre-set time limit by foot and public transportation. For anyone that has ever stepped out of the office to grab a quick bite and been missing for days as a result, this tool is for you.

Built on the familiar Google Maps, developer Stefan Wehrmeyer’s dead simple interface allows users to find their location and then illuminating the areas they can reach. Mapnificent does much more, though, allowing you to search for destinations within the areas you can get to — say, finding a bar within 20 minutes of your office. And if you’re the sociable type, you can select multiple locations and find locations that can be reached by both parties in the selected time frame.

The service is only available in certain U.S. cities, and fewer foreign locales. But an idea this good is sure to grow, and could be coming to a public transportation system near you.

To see a video of the service in action, read on after the jump.

Amanda Peyton, the creator of social messaging service MessageParty, has posted this intriguing image of the web, re-imagined as neighborhoods of Manhattan. She took her inspiration, she says, from the East Coast origins of many of the services, along with what she sees as a New Yorks mindset to services like Twitter.  On her blog, Peyton discusses her reasoning behind the placement:

Twitter + Wall Street: Frenetic, Jumbled, Terse, but incredibly powerful

Tumblr + West Village and Meatpacking: Coolness to a fault

Email + Chelsea and Times Square: Large, unmanageable, swelling, but ultimately the pulse of everything

Facebook + Upper East Side: The center of the “establishment”

Hacker News + Spanish Harlem: Steadfast, growing like a weed though few people notice, culture-rich but somewhat insulated

The full list can be found on her site, but it leaves one question unanswered: what is Central Park? In my mind, the beautiful and massive anchor to the city could be Google, or some other essential service. Readers, what do you think?

(Amanda Peyton via Beta Beat)

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has the auspicious aim of creating a map of the universe that is accurate, and covering much greater distances than ever before. The result was unveiled this past Sunday, and the team seems to have lived up to their claim.

The map’s makers used 14,000 quasars, some of the brightest bodies in the universe, to illuminate gas clouds in regions of space some 11 billion light years away. From the study:

These features arise as the light from the quasar is absorbed by the intervening neutral hydrogen. This gives one-dimensional information about the fluctuations in the neutral hydrogen density along the line of sight to the quasar. When spectra of many quasars are combined, it allows one to build a three-dimensional image of the fluctuations in the neutral hydrogen density and thus infer the corresponding fluctuations in the matter density.

Though not the first attempt at intergalactic map making, it is the first to use the interaction of gas and quasars as the primary points of reference instead of the bright light from galaxies. It will surely be some time before a person would need this to find their way around, but in the meantime it could give scientists a clearer picture of the nature of our universe. For instance, comparing such quasar-based maps could demonstrate how the structure of the universe has changed over time, and maybe hint at the role of forces like dark energy in those changes.

(image and story via New Scientist)

If you’re already using the Google Maps Navigation app on your Android device, you’ll have a sweet surprise coming to you: The app can now avoid bad traffic. Interestingly, this will not rely solely on up-to-the-minute data. From the Google Mobile blog:

Starting today, our routing algorithms will also apply our knowledge of current and historical traffic to select the fastest route from those alternates. That means that Navigation will automatically guide you along the best route given the current traffic conditions.

The feature is, however, limited to areas in Europe and North America where real-time traffic conditions are available.

Traffic avoidance is being introduced as an automatic feature — meaning that the app will be taking traffic data into account as soon as you fire it up. This might be jarring for some users, especially those who only use navigation for a portion of their trip (I am completely guilty of ignoring my GPS as it re-calculates while I drive to the edge of my geographical knowledge). Google does point out, though, that using the app may make driving better for everyone by keeping users out of sprawling traffic jams.

This kind of traffic avoidance technology has been available on dedicated GPS devices for some time, though almost always as a paid feature. Bringing this capability to the masses will certainly make companies like Garmin nervous, and hopefully get people to their destinations faster.

(Google via Engadget)

Cartoonist Dan Meth has completed what he regards as the complete map of the Fantasy Universe, leading one to wonder how exactly border disputes are handled between, say, Krull and Oz. Drawing from comics, books, movies, and video games, the map is very inclusive in its approach covering just about any realm you’d care to wander through. Bonus points if you can name them all without Googling.

The map is part of a series of popculture graphs. Geekosystem readers may enjoy his Trilogy Meter or his Futuristic Movie Timeline.

(Dan Meth via Buzzfeed)