The Null Device blog: Visualising Facebook friendship

Data visualisation of the day: if you draw lines between the locations of people connected to each other on Facebook, you get this map of connections:

A few interesting observations:

There are notable dark patches: China is an obvious one, between the Great Firewall and the prevalence of home-grown websites. Brazil is also dark (presumably because everyone's on Orkut instead), as is Russia (LiveJournal is apparently the big thing there to this day). The Middle East is also largely Facebookless, with the exception of Turkey, Lebanon and Israel. Africa is also largely dark, with a few, largely self-contained patches of light.
The east coast of Australia is more strongly connected to New Zealand than to the west coast.

There are 2 comments on "Visualising Facebook friendship":

Posted by: 23Skidoo Thu Dec 16 01:44:30 2010

Russia also has its own Facebook clone, vkontakte, with ~100 million users. For comparison, there are only ~2 million Russian users on Facebook.

Posted by: Greg Thu Dec 16 21:25:41 2010

It's striking how regional (not evenly dispersed) it is.

It looks like this is partly because Facebook use depends on country - it's popular in some countries but not others, so you can see national borders all over the map. Interesting that countries and not some other demographic division determines FB use.

It also looks like most relationships are local, which suggests FB friendships represents real offline relationships and not arbitrary connections. (I guess MySpace Music would have more of the latter.)

The FB dataset will be a gold mine for social researchers if they ever get access to it. A similar thing is going on in MMORPGs, where some researchers are finally getting access to thte Everquest dataset, and maybe others as well. (http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/02/aaas-60tb-of-behavioral-data-the-everquest-2-server-logs.ars)