Celebrity twitter is mostly sports twitter

What you see above is a really interesting visualization of verified twitter users that was created in house at twitter recently during an internal hack week. They discovered some rather interesting things about who follows who among the verified class:

The users in this map are colored by category: blue for news, purple for government and politics, red for music, yellow for sports and green for TV — the five largest categories on Twitter today.

One of the many fascinating things about this diagram is that it shows which accounts tend to follow those outside their category. For example, the reason that blue and purple almost seem to merge into one another is that journalists tend to follow politicians, and vice versa. The same is true of TV and music, down in the bottom right, with musicians and TV stars following each other often.

We can even see how usage varies by country. For instance, on the left you have a purple swath of government users following yellow sports users — it turns out these are largely UK politicians following prominent athletes. In the top middle, a line of Spanish-language pop stars, TV companies, sportspeople and government bodies. The purple outcrop at around two o’clock is Japanese politics; the red island below it is Japanese music.

And that sports (yellow) seems to dominate the entire thing.

Interesting.