Friday, February 11, 2011

Amazing world view - Facebook friends visualized.

This image was so intriguing to me, that I had to stop, write this post, and make the image my desktop background. We have all heard the Facebook statistics - 500 millions users worldwide and growing.  Large numbers are sometimes hard to comprehend.  This image of 10 million pairs of friends from facebook tells the story of facebook's power to connect the world in a single image. Paul Butler graphed the friend pairs by locality and this is what he saw.  You can read more about his methods here.

8 comments:

monika hardy said...

cool Jim..
first glance reminded me of this chess game:
http://www.turbulence.org/spotlight/thinking/chess.html

James said...

Monika, thank you for sharing. This is very interesting. Could this be an example of what we must do... understand networks in order to position ourselves in the network?

James said...

I feel another post coming on :)

monika hardy said...

yes - i really believe that.

not only understand networks, but understand networks that have the potential to create serendipity - or the right move - to an individual or community.

danah boyd says she goes to where the clusters are to see why and how they are clustering.

James said...

Yes, people who learn to do this in a very sophisticated way will win. This is one thing we must work on - learning how to understand our clusters.

Joe said...

A world of connections and engagement.

James said...

Joe, it makes me wonder - what's next. How will we learn to use all of these connections - what tools current and future will help us? Amazing stuff.

Unknown said...

Jim, thank you for sharing. I agree with you about the learning challenge for the millions of people who are still awaiting the epiphany, interest and will to get engaged. Care to speculate what this image will be in 3 years, 5 years?