Toying with Facebook apps this week-end, I ran across the "where I've been" application; the one that allows you to store the countries you have visited. Here's a screenshot of the world map:

What's interesting is the level of granularity the map depicts: as one can see, every nations are represented (well almost, islands such as Mauritius are not) but it's funny to not that North America (USA+Canada) have a finer-grained representation given that states and province are showed.

Although I am not surprised by that, especially when you consider the audience of FB (mostly North America) as well as who designed it, this sort of depiction is interesting. It definitely shows a sort of spectrum that goes from a "precise/fine grained" end (NA) to a "imprecise/unknown" end (with countries not represented as well as no differentiation of big countries). A bit culture centric, this map would be very interesting to discuss with people from local culture. Of course, I know it's not the biggest feature in FB (and the same comments can be done on other web apps) but that's curious noting.

I would have have found curious some sort of user-generated map representations. For example, something such as the fool's world map: