Friday Five: 5 Real-Time Websites That'll Change Your World View

We all know a picture is worth 1,000 words, but what about real-time visuals of your location, social media activity, and ATM use when it's posted online? In this digital age, all types of information is being uploaded, downloaded, tracked, and analyzed at any given moment. It's amazing to see how much online activities is actually tracked and how it is being used. Check out these 5 real-time websites that'll change the way you view the world, or at least change the way you view online privacy.

 

 

1. Map.ipviking.com

 
How many cyber attacks do you think are going on right now? Find out at map.ipviking.com as you watch real-time hacks happen worldwide. This map by security provider Norse helps provide a visual of just how common cyber attacks are across the world. It's interesting to watch these live attack attempts, know the location of the attacker and target, and much more. The attempted attacks shown are caught by Norse's "honeypot" hacking traps, which is just a small portion of total activity worldwide. The rainbow-colored "shots" and glowing bubbles give the site an entertaining video game-like feel. Check out them out and you'll be impressed by just how many attacks there are in such a short amount of time.

 

 

 

 

2. Tweetping.net

Watch the world tweet with Tweetping.net! Tweetping provides a unique visualization of tweets from all around the world with their mesmerizing real-time map and stats of what people are tweeting, location of the tweet, hashtags being used, and much more. I recorded about 2,400 tweets worldwide in just one minute. When doing a little math and assuming that number were to stay consistent all year, that would total about 1.26 billion tweets per year. It's important to note that this site is likely using public streams that are offered by Twitter, which captures about one percent of tweets out of an estimated 340 million tweets posted per day. This site may give you a new found respect for Twitter's popularity and may will likely make you wonder where else your tweets end up.

 

 

 

 

3. Newsmap.jp

Newsmap is an awesome website that provides news in an extremely simple way. It shows what's going on and how much coverage it's getting in a simple map like platform. The bigger the box on the map, the more popular the story is. Newsmap allows you to display news by category like: World, National, Business, Technology, Sports, Entertainment, etc, as well as by country such as U.S., U.K., Spain, Mexico, France, and more. You can combine countries and categories to see just how popular stories are in different regions. This site is great for capturing real-time news stories in one or more topics and countries.

 

 

 

 

4. Immersion.media.mit.edu

MIT's Immersion project provides a visualization of the people you email the most after you connect your Gmail, Yahoo, or Microsoft Exchange account, as well as how your contacts are connected to each other. It's all based off the metadata from the emails you send and receive. This is the same information that the NSA says is no big deal to collect. Check it out and you'll see just how that information can be used. Immersion will delete your information after use if you don't want your metadata stored for analysis.

 

 

 

 

5. WeAreData.WatchDogs.com

 
Ever wonder how much of your data is accessible to the public? We Are Data by Watch Dogs shows just how much publicly available data is out there if you know where to look. This site gathers publicly available data from Paris, London, and Berlin and has recreated these towns on a 3D map to provide a visual of the exact locations of real-time activity on ATM locations, traffic lights, open mobile lines, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, Flickr, CCTV, and notable electromagnetic fields. It even shows the location of trains as they roll along the rails. You can click on Tweet icons to see the tweets sent and the location of individual. This site visually shows just how much real-time data is really out there and how easy it is to access. If you didn't feel like you were being watched before, you may feel it now.


Post By: Justin Narayan