November 23, 2008 4:57 AM PST
Visualizing Facebook from outer space
The globe shows the activity of Facebook users across the planet at 4:37 a.m. PST. The East Coast of the U.S. is a beehive of social activity.
(Credit: Facebook)Some Facebook engineers came up with a visualization of user activity by the social network's 120 million active users across the planet. According to TechCrunch, the concept (named The Palant?r of Orthanc after an object from The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, was created at a Facebook hackathon and could be turned into a product. Check the video of the visualization.
Dan Farber is editor in chief of CBS Interactive News, which includes CBSNews.com and CNET News. He has more than 25 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. E-mail Dan. 
This is identical to a 20% project that I saw while I was at Google for an interview...in Fall 2004! The only difference being that Google's visualization was queries per different location.
Pretty original, just like the facebook concept.