Take Me To: Tracerouted Streetviews

When routing to a website, a number of intermediate hops occur across other networks. Tracerouting exposes the IP address of these enroute hops — and when coupled with registration information, a physical location and organization can be found. I’ve been developing a site (not yet live) which couples these registration addresses with corresponding street view images of the physical locations.

Networks are often discussed as immaterial —the so-called cloud. Take Me To attemps to reinforce the physicality of vast network infrastructures. Rather than proceeding directly to a particular website, Take Me To traceroutes the final destination and displays each hop with the corresponding Google Streetview. Upon reaching the final destination, the user can proceed to the intended website.

The process videos below show the trace routes from two different physical locations (721 Broadway and my apartment in Brooklyn) to two different websites (my portfolio and daringfireball.net). Each video frame maps to 1ms, so the length of videos are proportional to the tracerouting duration. They reveal the pervasiveness of certain telecommunications companies such as Level 3 and Verizon which become a funnel for many sites.