For many people Twitter has become the best place for discovering the latest and most interesting work in a variety of fields. In my twitter client I keep a search column open that gets constantly updated with the latest tweets pertaining to data visualization or infographics and I see lots of beautiful content flow by. I've been collecting these tweets for quite a while and thought it would be interesting to analyze them and see which visualizations were shared through twitter the most often.
Many of the top links in the domain were articles containing collections of visualizations chosen to be the 'Top NNN' by some panel of experts. For example, the top most shared link was 50 Great Examples of Data Visualization by Web Designer Depot. I will have another post in the near future that lists the most popular of these types of links as well as separate lists for products/frameworks and news/analysis. For this list I chose to focus instead on references to individual data visualizations or infographics.
Here are the top 20 ordered by popularity. Click on either the link or image to go to the original article.
Note that the link made popular on Twitter for #9 Death and Taxes was actually a link to an image on imageshack and I have used instead a link to the original source of the material.
The tweets for this entire analysis were collected from March 24, 2009 until December 31, 2009. Only the first link to a specific item from each Twitter ID was counted so that one person did not unfairly impact the results by tweeting frequently about the same thing.
Items 11-20 are listed below.