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Description

First Edition of Randall Munroe's Online Communities Map

Fine example of Randall's first map of Online Communities, issued the year after Facebook became open to all users on September 26, 2006.

As noted below the title "Geographic Area Represents Estimated Size of Membership," as of 2007.  The writer notes: " Not a complete survey. Sizes based on best figures I could find but involved some guesswork. Do not use for navigation."

Geographic location means a bit more, however, as the Compass-Rose-Shaped-Island object in the center of the map shows, with Practicals to the north, Intellectuals to the south, Focus on Web to the east and Focus on Real Life to the west.

MySpace is the largest of the websites, with the Icy North of Yahoo and Windows Live of similar size.  Wikipedia is an archipelago of islands toward the bottom of the map.

In the Ocean of Subculture, several interesting early terms appear (Sea of Trolls and Sea of Memes), with others that never caught on.  Reddit is a tiny island fragment, just 2 years after its founding, with Flickr just 3 years old.

Among the more interesting companies shown is QQ, Chinese Instant Messaging System which currently has over 100 million users.

Randall Munroe is best known for the XKCD Comic Strip.  A second edition of the map was issued in 2010.