We were taking a look through our internal metrics this morning and we realized that Widgetbox widgets were seen in 214 countries yesterday.  How cool is that???  Omar – one of our rockstar developers – quickly exclaimed “That’s more countries than are at the Olympics!”  And he’s right.  There are 204 countries at the Olympics (sadly, I had to look that fact up).

What countries are those, exactly?  Well, here’s a (shhh – super secret!) chart from our internal metrics.

Sorry that United Kingdom and The Netherlands get cut off in this picture – since this is internal only it hasn’t gotten the Widgetbox UE treatment…  Anyways, you can see that we have the most distribution in the US and Europe, which isn’t too surprising.  What I find more fascinating is the “other” category.

You may or may not know this, but there are different answers for  the question “How many countries are there in the world?” The UN now recognizes 192 independent countries, The US State Department recognizes 194. and apparently most World Almanacs list 193 (source for this info is here).  So, does that mean Widgetbox is somehow being seen in more countries than there are in the world?  Like maybe in Outer Space by robots???  Nope – it means that some of the countries whose residents see our widgets aren’t independent nations.  There are 244 total possible “country-type” entities in the world.  So, on August 18th, 2008 from 12 AM to 12 PM, Widgetbox widgets were only not seen in 31 possible countries.  Plus, if you look at this distribution over a period of one week, or even one month, our widgets were seen in 217 countries for both periods, which means that our massive distribution is normal – there wasn’t something funky going on. That’s pretty hoTTT.

Some of my personal faves from yesterday’s full list are the 45,132 widget impressions that came from Taiwan (vs. the 33,064 that came from China, which I find interesting), the 10,059 impressions that came from Brunei Darussalam (bonus points if you can tell me where that is!), the 4,253 impressions that came from Iceland, and the 101 impressions that came from the Federated States of Micronesia.  You may also find it interesting that Iran got more hits than Iraq (5,911 vs. 614), and that Afghanistan and North Korea were nowhere on the list.  And who brought up the caboose yesterday?  Come on Turkmenistan – you saw one widget; we know you want more!!!

Pretty fun stuff.  Who knew you could get such a good geography lesson from widgets?  That’s the power of the Interwebs!

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