Burton MacKenzie

The friend wheel application for facebook is the most interesting data visualization tool of social networks that I have seen. Here's a recently generated friend wheel:
On the outside of the circle are all your facebook friends. If they are friends with any of your other friends, a link is shown between the names across the circle. It allows you, at a glance, to see the connectivity of your social network. It's a reasonable job of grouping tightly connected friends together so you can see clearer associative links, some with whom worlds collide.

I tried out the flash version on facebook as well, and it's even more interesting! It allows you to drag the "friend nodes" around while maintaining their connectivity. Try moving your friends around so that there are no overlapping lines between friends (you probably won't be able to totally untangle it). An unwound friends wheel gives even greater visualization of your social network:The unwound network of social connections more aptly shows subgroupings of friends and degree of "tight"ness in the subgroup, defined as how proximate each member in the graph is to each other. Friend "islands" can clearly be seen as isolated. Some chains of connections may uncover surprising full-circle "degrees of Kevin Bacon" associations. A heavy locus (impossible to untangle in two dimensions) clearly shows the more well connected members of your social groups.

Go try it. It's cool. (Of course, only do this after you've read and agreed to the application's privacy policy) It reminds me a lot of doing place-and-route with circuit boards. It is a fun, challenging puzzle.

On a topic tangential to social networks, Harmanjit has some interesting things to say on Depersonalization of Modern Society via Greater Connectivity and Availability. (my description, not his) From TFA: "Communication is so inexpensive so as to be almost free. [...] 'keeping in touch' becomes a tiresome and ultimately undoable exercise, unless one starts using canonical mass forwarded messages. But then, what does that 'keeping in touch' mean if one is only forwarding stock messages?"

I think overall he makes good and probably accurate points in the article. However, I think that greater accessibility only leads to stronger social connectivity. There is not enough time in the day, week, or year to keep meaningfully updated with any but a modest number of close friends. In my experience, enhanced instant (or time-shifted) connectivity doesn't diminish close friendships, but brings a greater feeling of camaraderie through pseudo-proximity, a extension of what one feels in person. For those who have busy days drinking from the firehose of life's other commitments, the portable, instant, time-efficient, and cheap communication offered by modern technology is a panacea for what formerly would have resulted in increased communicative isolationism. (When was the last time you sat down and wrote a letter on paper?)

A formal social network site like facebook also allows greater intellectual interaction with all your friends, not just the tightly connected, via a method unavailable (in degree) to the previous generation: Posted Items. People post links to interesting things they've found on the internet, which you are free to ignore, read at your leisure, or discuss with friends in a quasi-private way. Since many associations/friendships have been formed through common interests, the posted items of your friends are more likely to have an interest to you (as compared to a given random news portal). The intended-for-a-small-audience posted items of those to whom you are socially connected come with a higher signal to noise ratio. That is, while the user-submitted-content of web portals generally needs to rise in a large-scale meritorious evaluation to be seen by the maximal number of eyes, the personal network postings spread memes between individuals whose opinions are (in theory) respected by each other. Popular url web portals are like published "best seller" book lists, but Posted Items in facebook are much more like a friend recommending a book they liked.

I like getting recommendations from friends. If a friend is willing to say "this interested me and I think you should look at it, too", I want to see it.

If you think one of your friends should read this, let them know. There is a social bookmarking tool at the end of this article. Also, if you're on facebook, link up with me. I'd like to see the shape of the network of "random people from the internet". I suspect Christine Gambito's friends wheel is large, but poorly connected.

Burton MacKenZie www.burtonmackenzie.com