September 3, 2007
Its been a while since Facebook has been all that addicting. When it first started my roommates and I spent about a week looking up people and finding groups. Every couple weeks you could do it again since a whole new wave of people had signed up. At this point everyone who is going to sign up has done so. There are a few holdouts that refuse to sign up for whatever reasons.
When Facebook first started they let you view an image with the relationships between your friends. Sometimes you could get it to work and it was interesting. Not too long ago I was looking into SVG, which is what Facebook had used, and remembered that feature that disappeared so long ago and wished they had it back in some way.
Today I found TouchGraph. It does just what I was hoping for. It displays all your friends and their relationships to each other. It uses friends as well as groups. People with more common relationships appear closer together. People are also color coded into cliques. It correctly setup my cliques. There are 3 major ones, which are my middle school friends, high school friends, and college friends. Then there are smaller ones for jobs or small school groups. The odd colored cliques, or only one person having a particular color, stand out and you can see which of your Facebook friends don’t know any of your other friends. When you highlight over someone or a group it shows all the connections. If you double-click you will get profile information and pictures. There is the option to upload a picture to Facebook, but to get any sort of detail you need a much larger image.
TouchGraph also has applications for Amazon and Google.
Now I just need to find a program that will do this with my own set of inputs. I want to map a particular set of friends that includes some that are not on Facebook. My friends in one group get confused by the relationships between people in my other groups.
June 1, 2011
September 15, 2009