Your World, Our World – Connected Through Western Union

Are you the most globally networked individual? Almost all of us has a facebook account (i know you do too) but do you even bother how many friends overseas? Some of your friends may have gone abroad for work or decided to migrate without you knowing. There this cool Facebook App that will help you locate your friends’current whereabouts based on their facebook accounts.

One of the world’s most globally connected companies, Western Union, is celebrating its 160^th anniversary by launching a hunt for the most networked person in the world.

With 470,000 locations in 200 countries and territories. Western Union has an enormous global presence.

To celebrate this unique status, Western Union is calling for the Philippines’ most globally connected individuals to step forward and take the Western Union Network Challenge at www.westernunionworld.com/yourworld.

All you need to do is log in to you Facebook account and then on another tab log on to www.westernunionworld.com and click on your world. It’ll prompt you to allow the Facebook App to access your account information, just click allow and this will show up.

Your World will show the number of friends you have and the country their in. The app also computes your World Index (number of friends overseas multiplied by the number of countries you have friends with.) In my my World Index is at 540. I know you probably have better scores than I have. Try it it’s fun.

The column on the ride has a lot of information about Your World. Your World Rank, Country Rank and Network Rank. Network Rank is your ranking from the number of friends you have using the app. It’s a fun app and very informative.

Now here’s the challenge. Each individual’s score will also contribute to the score of the respective country of residence which will provide the ranking of the most geographically connected nations. The Philippines also has the opportunity to prove to be the most geographically connected nation in the world.

Aside from Your World, you can also check out our world. You can check out the world economic data or you can focus on once country. In the example below I chose the Philippines, of course. The left side shows the Economic Data, the center shows the map and a time line that you can drag to which ever year you want to check out. The right side shows Western Union of the Philippines.

Same page different year, 2009. You can see the changes on the economic data. What captured my attention is the population info. 1980 we’re at 47M after 29 years, 2009 we’re at 92M. You can also see the growth in remittances which only shows that more Filipinos are now overseas. You can play with the dates and make your own analysis. You nca use this in school for your Economics subject. This is really one great site.

Our history shows Western Union’s time line together with our history. 160 years of Western Union will be an enjoyable time travel. Again you have to do is drag the time line, it’s reading a pop-up book.

Western Union really knows how to connect people with a combined network of approximately 470,000 agent locations in 200 countries and territories. In 2010, The Western Union Company completed 214 million consumer-to-consumer transactions worldwide, moving $76 billion of principal between consumers, and 405 million business payments.