Source: Washington Post

Say you wanted to figure out where all the tourists were. How would you do it?

Well, some researchers at MapBox and Gnip teamed up to figure out a clever hack to find out where out-of-towners were hanging out in San Francisco. They used Twitter data.

Many Twitter messages are geotagged (have the location attached to them). Are you a “Local” always tweeting from San Francisco? Or, are you a “Tourist,” typically tweeting from somewhere else but tweeting from San Francisco while you are there?

The above map shows the concentration of “Tourist” tweets in red and “Locals” in blue. No surprise, the out-of-towners hang out by Union Square, Fisherman’s Wharf, AT&T Park, and the Golden Gate Bridge.

So, if you want to know where you can get overpriced food, weak drinks, and exorbitantly-priced fleece jackets, now you know!

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