I made a visualization that shows the tweets for specific words and can account for population density (only US though): http://tweetpleth.herokuapp.com/
Why? To me it seems simple supply & demand problem. Access to fire-hose is not so expensive. Hardware is dirt cheap, code is not complex either so you can go with relatively cheap junior developer for such problem. Also it takes only a little of manager's time.
It would be completely different matter if we were talking about finding patters, predicting trends, etc.
What the heck is going down in Argentina? Uruguay seems fine but Argentina it's supposed to be 40 million people there and we can hardly see anything. Chile is only 16 million people and way brighter than Argentina.
Ooooh. But I know what's going on in Argentina: ultra-leftist state currently confiscating private properties and private companies and restricting civil liberties (for example rampant inflation and people forbidden to change their money into foreign currencies). Why? Because socialism led, of course, to poverty, inflation and unemployment (Greece is going this way and France and Spain shall go this way too soon if they don't do anything).
Venezuela and it's 28 million people is totally pathetic too.
That's socialism for you guys.
I can't begin to understand how people still want to be socialist when they see what that dangerous ideology does to countries...
I was there this summer. martinced's comment made me laugh out loud.
For martinced's information, about a third of the population of Argentina lives in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area which has a nice bright dot. Uruguay is not fine, it has almost nothing. I think you're confusing it with Brazil hahaha.
Of all the people I met in Argentina, if they didn't use twitter it was because they had better things to do. They all used facebook for example.
If you're going to glean any political ideology from this map, you should get off this anti-socialism fetish and look over at Africa...
