More on geo and Google Buzz in a bit, but I thought I'd post this comment by Steve Baker on the five nations in the USA for Facebook visualization that is doing the rounds at the minute.
I am an engineer for Oodle, the company that runs Facebook Marketplace. One of the things we noticed the day we launched Marketplace was that many folks with traditional Arab names (such as the ones above) were posting classified listings from places such as Cairo, Illinois, and Alexandria, Louisiana. Upon further review, we realized that an autocomplete feature we had built for a location textbox was taking the values "Cairo" and "Alexandria" and completing those names out to US locations with the same name. In other words, folks would just type in a location of "Cairo" for their listing, hit enter, and it became Cairo, Illinois.
In the chapter on data modeling I sort of assumed that you will model the entire world at the start, but encourage people to come from your home country at first. This comment shows that you really do need to think about the whole world up front.
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