7 Cool Sites for Seeing Worldwide Internet Activity

Catch a glimpse of what people all over the world are doing online right now

By
Elise Moreau
Elise Moreau
Elise Moreau
Freelance Contributor
  • University of Ontario
  • George Brown College
Elise Moreau is a writer that has covered social media, texting, messaging, and streaming for Lifewire. Her work has appeared on Techvibes, SlashGear, Lifehack and others.
lifewire's editorial guidelines
Updated on March 5, 2020

It can be fun to browse your social media feeds to see what's happening in the world, but sometimes curiosity takes you elsewhere. Wouldn't it be fascinating, for example, to know how many tweets were sent within the last second, or how many emails were sent today, or what the the most popular GIF was at a given moment?

Take a look at some of these global traffic monitoring and stat-tracking websites to catch a glimpse of the internet in real time.

01
of 07

Internet Live Stats

InternetLiveStats.com

Want to see the number of internet users and activities increase right before your very eyes? With Internet Live Stats, you can see the total number of internet users and websites currently online. The site tallies the total number of emails sent, tweets published, and Google searches entered in a given day. And there's a slew of other mind-blowing internet stats to scroll through as well.

02
of 07

GIF Hell

GIFHell.com

Giphy provides trending updates of the most popular GIFs on its front page. But if you want to see the most popular GIFs being shared at a given moment, then ​GIF Hell is what you need.

The website tracks the amount of shares a GIF gets in the shortest amount of time and posts them on the site's Popular tab. You can also browse through the most shared GIFs or check out the Firehose tab to see GIFs being tweeted in real time.

03
of 07

Emoji Tracker

EmojiTracker.com

You know how popular emoji are, but did you know there's a site that tracks emoji use on X/Twitter as they're posted in real time? Upon visiting and approving the epilepsy warning, the site presents you with a grid of emoji icons and the number of times they've been tweeted. The data updates live, providing a raw view of the most common emoji—and, in a way, the most common emotions—at any given moment.

04
of 07

The Pirate Cinema

ThePirateCinema.com

Ever wonder what a visual presentation of the internet's most torrented movies would look like? The Pirate Cinema provides exactly that, taking the Pirate Bay's top 100 videos and stringing together clips from the BitTorrent files being exchanged in real time.

It feels like you're surfing speedily through TV channels, which can get rather dizzying after a few seconds. For that reason it's more interesting than informative.

05
of 07
A screenshot of Trends.Google.com.

Google Trends is a popular tool used to explore trending search topics. But not many people know about the associated visualizer that lets you view searches as they occur in real time.

Of course, you can't see all searches at once (because that would be madness), but you can get a brief snapshot of some of the hottest searches. There's also an option to drill down by region, and to download the tool for use as a desktop screensaver.

06
of 07

Tweeplers

Tweeplers.com.

Tweeplers is the go-to site for observing trends on X in real time. For a close look at how the entire world tweets, there's the Tweeplers Map, which features a heat map of all the current tweets coming in around the world and from where.

07
of 07

Wikipedia Vision

Ikozma.net.

Wikipedia can be edited by anyone. That makes it inherently questionable but also more adaptable than traditional publishing sources. A beta tool called Wikipedia Vision tracks the edits left by anonymous users and displays them on a map as they happen. It also includes the link to the corresponding Wikipedia page.

You can review chart information about edits occurring within the past 24 hours, as well as a snapshot of the most recent edits. 

Was this page helpful?