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Yesterday we shared Eric Fisher's visualization of global Twitter and Flickr usage. His illustrations mapped out where in the world Twitter and Flicker are used most heavily and made for some great imagery. Today we've found another nifty map. MIT's Senseable City Lab in collaboration with IBM and AT&T has created an interactive map charting mobile phone connections across the country. They're calling it the Connected States of America and the project makes for more than just neat imagery because the map uses density of phone connections between different regions to map social communities of people that may be geographically far-flung.

In the image below phone activity and strong connections between regions are indicated by corresponding colors, showing for example, that residents of the Northeast are far more likely to share a community with Florida residents than they are with their neighbors directly to the south and that in Texas social communities are actually pretty well-defined by state borders.

With the interactive map one can select different parts of the country to see where it is connected most strongly to other places. For example, it's no a surprise that New Yorkers and San Francisco residents talk a lot, but who knew residents of Hancock, Maine talk frequently with residents of Tucson?

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.