Visualizing Global Empathy

I had this idea 20 years ago.

I built the prototype in about 20 minutes using exe.dev. More on that below.

The Original Vision

The idea was a small globe spinning in the corner of a news broadcast or website. When something happens in a corner of the world, the globe lights up before the news can report it. Magic made possible by a social-listening platform that aggregates likes, posts, comments, and tweets across the web—letting you see what different groups of people around the world are thinking in real time.

Voice-Driven Curiosity

The interface is designed for questions, not clicks. You just ask:

• "What do Chinese teenagers think about the war in Iran?"
• "Why is everyone talking about this town in Nepal?"

The globe draws the story with light—showing conversations, sentiment, and actions like donations of time, money, or support flowing between cities and continents. Every arc on the globe represents something real: a person reaching across a border, a community responding to a crisis, a wave of solidarity forming in real time.

What It Shows

Turn on the news and you hear about division, conflict, and polarization. But zoom out far enough—literally—and a different story unfolds. Across the planet, at every moment, humans are reaching across borders to help each other. They're donating to causes thousands of miles away. They're volunteering time. They're expressing solidarity, spreading awareness, responding to disasters.

These acts of empathy happen constantly, but they're invisible unless you know where to look. Glowbe makes them visible: Thoughts & Prayers, Donations, Time & Volunteering, Solidarity, Awareness, and Environment signals, all flowing between cities in real-time across 20+ countries. The system tracks a positive sentiment score—currently around 74%—proving what we suspected: most human connection is fundamentally optimistic.

Beyond Visualization

Glowbe isn't just something you look at. It can raise awareness and enable aid through Patreon-style donations, or be used by organizations to highlight their global efforts with Glassdoor-style memberships. Imagine an NGO showing donors exactly where their money is creating impact—live, on a spinning globe, with real data flowing in. That's the platform we're building.

20 Years → 20 Minutes

Here's the part that still blows my mind. I carried this idea around for two decades. The technology wasn't there. The data sources didn't exist. The cost of real-time 3D rendering in a browser was prohibitive. Then everything changed at once: social listening APIs matured, WebGL got fast enough, and tools like exe.dev made it possible to go from concept to working prototype in a single sitting.

Twenty years of waiting. Twenty minutes of building. That's the world we live in now.

Glowbe is live now at glowbe.exe.xyz. Watch the connections light up. See the empathy flow. And remember: this isn't aspirational. It's happening right now, all around you. We're just making it visible.