It would have been nice to have the great lakes and caspian sea, because they're such large features but with a team of two webdevs, some things have to wait until version 2.

Inner regions like lakes weren't included since they would complicate the svg without a lot of benefit.

I thought the map was a static PNG image: http://glow.mozilla.org/maps/world_4.png

Edit: I stand corrected. I missed this call: http://glow.mozilla.org/maps/world_4.svg

http://grab.by/9C5w

(seen top-right here http://www.zeus.com/products/global-load-balancer/index.html)

We perform the lookup using the binary database and the Java client directly off of the web request and only store the location in HBase so we don't keep the IP around in a database.

While it is possible to set up WebSockets or something similar to do a truly fancy data flow, we preferred to spend our bandwidth resources on making Firefox 4 available for people to download. ;)

http://glow.mozilla.org/data/json/2011/03/22/16/51/map.json

This would actually be an excellent opportunity for http streaming (ie, the forever frame), too. Long polling is great when you're waiting for a singular event, but not so much when it's ongoing data being pushed down.

http://github.com/potch/glow