{"id":645497,"date":"2013-03-06T16:02:43","date_gmt":"2013-03-06T21:02:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=617449"},"modified":"2013-03-06T16:02:43","modified_gmt":"2013-03-06T21:02:43","slug":"want-a-map-of-the-internet-theres-an-app-for-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/645497","title":{"rendered":"Want a map of the internet? There\u2019s an app for that."},"content":{"rendered":"

The folks at Peer1, the hosting provider, have my number. They just released a map of the Internet that combines my love of cartography and connectivity<\/a> in one beautiful mash up of pixels. The app is pretty simple, and shows the connections between bandwidth providers around the world.<\/p>\n

It’s an update to the a physical map Peer1 did in 2011<\/a>, that was also awesome, but thanks to the Android<\/a>\u00a0and iOS apps<\/a> you can now play around with the map in a global view or a network view. The global view is like one of those satellite images of city lights at night with glowing dots representing connections. The network view is a bit more esoteric, clustering those with the most connections at one end.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

The network view.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

It’s pretty basic, focusing mostly on the names of the players and how many connections they have to others on the net. For example it shows Hurricane Electric and Level 3 with more than a thousand connections to other peers while Google has 59. Apple and Facebook have 32 and 17 respectively. The app also allows you to perform a traceroute<\/a> to measure how long it takes packets to traverse the networks, but that function wasn’t working on the iOS version I downloaded.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

A global view with provider info.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

There’s also a little timeline where you can watch how the internet spreads with more providers and connection points popping up. As for why Peer1 did an app instead of a poster or even a web site, Rajan Sodhi of PEER 1 said via email:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWe decided to go with a mobile app for phones and tablets because we wanted to take advantage of the human gesturing \u2013 tapping, pinching, swiping, panning, rotating, etc \u2013 to make a more interactive and immersive experience for the user. The internet is complex, as the user can see, and we want to simplify or humanize it to make it more understandable.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I can’t wait to show my daughter as just one more way to explain how we’re all connected using the internet. This isn’t an app you’d use every day, but it is a beautiful way to show someone what the internet looks like.<\/p>\n

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Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:<\/strong>
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