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Facebook intern visualizes friendships, draws world map
- matylda 16y agoWere it possible to gather the data, it'd be interesting to see a breakdown of how the connections were made. I'm curious whether more were a result of travel/temporary visits or relocation/permanent moves.
- gills 16y agoI think the giant bright line through central Mexico into Arizona is pretty funny.
- jacobolus 16y agoThat "giant bright line" tracks along the coastline of the Pacific Ocean/Gulf of California. Why is it funny? There is a major highway there, and many populous cities along the shore. As you go inland a ways there is a giant desert and then a giant mountain range – it seems reasonable that such areas are thus less populated. Many parts of that map have "giant bright lines" along coastlines (for example, Spain, Australia, northwest Africa).
- ndunn2 16y agoNice piece of data visualization there. +1 for using great circles instead of straight lines.
- treyp 16y agothe lack of china is pretty interesting. russia is practically non-existent too, but it's much larger (especially with this map projection) with a much smaller population.
- joshzayin 16y agoI'd suspect it's because people in China use proxies to evade the filter, and hence have non-Chinese IPs.
- treyp 16y agothe data used is not based on IPs, but on user-submitted "current cities" instead, as mentioned in the blog post
- joshzayin 16y agoOh, huh. That's weird. I wonder if Chinese Internet users for some reason think they'd be caught evading the filter if they put their actual city in their profile? Or maybe his sampling method was just abysmal? ;)
- Yahivin 16y agoThe lack of China on the map was interesting to me as well. I believe that Facebook being blocked in China has quite a bit to do with it.
- smokinn 16y agoNot really. The real reason is 2 letters long: QQ EDIT: To explain and not be snarky, QQ is an IM/portal/social network/web mail/social game platform that is actually larger than Facebook. (Over 600 million active last I checked.) They completely dominate every aspect of Chinese web software.
- mousa 16y agoThere would be many more using Facebook if it wasn't blocked. I'm not sure how it's doing now but I remember lots of students last year were joining xiaonei which is just a facebook duplicate for Chinese students only. IMO many of these sites are blocked in China so Chinese companies can dominate the domestic market rather than for political reasons.
- Charuru 16y agoNot at all true. QQ is more akin to MSN than to Facebook (even though it tried to do social networking features, it did them late and poorly). Facebook would be on this list if it weren't blocked in China: http://venturebeat.com/2010/04/07/china%E2%80%99s-top-4-social-networks-renren-kaixin001-qzone-and-51-com/ http://venturebeat.com/2010/04/07/china%E2%80%99s-top-4-soci...
- garply 16y agoChina already has 2 indigenous Facebooks, Kaixin (targeted towards professional workers) and Renren (targeted towards college students). It also has QQ, which is more like MSN Messenger + MySpace + gaming. Filtered or not, US web companies don't tend to do well in China. Amazon and eBay aren't filtered, for example, but they both completely flopped here. A lot of it has to do with US tech companies not understanding how (or being unwilling) to do business like Chinese.
- dmaz 16y agoRussia primarily uses Vkontakte.
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- sahaj 16y agoalso, brazil is still holding out for the most part. i wonder what the penetration rate of a social network needs to be in order for users to not jump ship to facebook?
- brandong 16y agoI believe Brazil is heavily invested into orkut.
- dasil003 16y agoI wouldn't say Brazil is holding out, it's just that population is heavily concentrated on the southern coast. The northern parts of the country have a smaller, poorer population. It would probably be brighter if Orkut didn't exist, but the Amazon basin would still be completely dark.
- acgourley 16y agoAm I reading it right? R generated that?
- chunkbot 16y agoYou're surprised? Why?
- gloob 16y agoI can't speak for the poster you're responding to, but if it's easy to make things that pretty in R, I suddenly want to learn it.
- marcinw 16y agoWe're all wondering what he used to visualize his data set.
- acgourley 16y agoMy experience with R is that it generates much more... utilitarian output.
- pragetruif 16y agoThe visualization definitely wasn't done in R. I'm guessing he used Gephi (see, for example, http://gephi.org/2010/map-geocoded-data-with-gephi/ http://gephi.org/2010/map-geocoded-data-with-gephi/).
- miguelrios 16y agoI bet you Gephi cannot handle more than tens of thousands of node.
- bajsejohannes 16y agoHow can you tell that it definitely was not done in R? He says > As a sanity check, I plotted points at some of the latitude and longitude coordinates. To my relief, what I saw was roughly an outline of the world. His plot doesn't "know" about the world - he is just drawing curves between points in a plane (lat. and long.). I haven't used R, but I am sure that would be possible.
- DanielN 16y agoSeems to comply pretty well with this http://www.vincos.it/world-map-of-social-networks/ http://www.vincos.it/world-map-of-social-networks/ Notice the conspicuous absence of China, Russia and Brazil.
- hyperbovine 16y agoWhy auspicious?
- DanielN 16y agoBecause I'm an idiot and meant conspicuous. I'll be editing that now.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- DrJokepu 16y agoIt's really interesting that you can clearly see the differences between West Germany from East Germany, even 20 years after the reunification. Also the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 80 years after the end of the World War I. I also wonder who those users in North Korea are.
- trafficlight 16y agoThose are all Kim Jong-il
- varjag 16y agoKim Jong Il is friend to all Korean people, but the map does not reflect that?
- sabon 16y agoHe is a true friend to all those Koreans. But the map only shows those who have computers. AND access to internet. Which would be his family, government and more or less that's it. The rest would love to show their friendship and devotion to Kim but can't - lack of computers is killing them...
- eru 16y ago> It's really interesting that you can clearly see the differences between West Germany from East Germany, even 20 years after the reunification. That might also be an artefact of young people leaving East Germany for West Germany and Berlin. The facebook population density in East Germany seems to be quite low by that picture.
- doyoulikeworms 16y agoI might be mistaken, but I believe he took the destinations from the current city profile field. I'm sure there aren't that many Facebook users in North Korea.
- nostromo 16y agobackgroundify! (removed branding, resized to 1920x1200): http://s3.amazonaws.com/fb-world-image/fb-worldmap.jpg http://s3.amazonaws.com/fb-world-image/fb-worldmap.jpg The US / Canadian border in the West is interesting. It seems between west of the great lakes and east of Seattle there isn't much connection across the border.
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- patrickaljord 16y agozoomed http://zoom.it/9qx1 http://zoom.it/9qx1
- dedward 16y agoCould just be a graphing anomaly, or that there aren't many people living on either side of the border in those areas.
- ecuzzillo 16y agoOn the other hand, if you were to think of the kind of people in each country who wouldn't have any friends at all in the other country, wouldn't they probably live around there?
- btilly 16y agoI've been in that area. I think it is real. It is a lot easier to move around and work on one side of the border or the other, which leads to people naturally not meeting people on the other side. In the east there are so many more people and there is so much cross border traffic due to trade (particularly from the auto industry) that a lot more cross border connections exist.
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- ch 16y agoNeat. It is interesting how similar this rendering is to Chris Harrison's city-to-city map: http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/InternetMap/medium/worldBlack.jpg http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/InternetMap/medium/wor...
- xentronium 16y agoIf you're interested: Russia is missing because we've got one very similar social network[1][2] that's got arguably more features and arrived to the market a year or so earlier than facebook got its russian localization. [1] http://vk.com http://vk.com [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vkontakte http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vkontakte
- ugh 16y agoI’m pretty sure that this is a development that happened all over the World. Germany had its own Facebook clone [1] early on and it absolutely dominated before Facebook entered the German market [2]. That’s now no more the case. To quote StudiVZ CEO Riedl: “There is now no more direct battle against the global player Facebook.” [3] It’s interesting to see that the Facebook clone worked in Russia but didn’t in other places. [1] StudiVZ: http://www.studivz.net/ http://www.studivz.net/ [2] StudiVZ was founded in November 2005 (a whole year earlier than Vkontakte), Facebook was localized in early 2008 [3] A week ago, in an interview (German): http://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/it-medien/studivz-chef-clemens-riedl-es-gibt-keinen-kampf-gegen-facebook-mehr;2706777;0 http://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/it-medien/studivz-ch...
- xentronium 16y agoThat's an interesting case. I might make some wild guesses based on what I see: 1. vk ports features from fb 3 to 6 months after they appear (share-widget, like-widget, connect-widget, possible friends) 2. vk's got a comprehensive search engine with lots of filters by age, city, gender, current status (married, single, in active search etc.). Lots of people I know use vk for dating. I might be missing something, but I didn't find such a thing for facebook. 3. vk's got native music and video upload. By native I mean that you don't use any third party application/service to do this. Everything's hosted on vk's servers. That's the reason copyright owners sued vk several times (RIAA even blacklisted the guys). However, they [copyright holders] lost in all the court cases. 4. VK offers cheap contextual ads. While not exactly a killer feature, it is very nifty for business, -- they only charge per-click and if you get the targeting and ad text right, you'll get more visitors than you need. 5. Another random guess is that it's easier for a German than for a Russian to migrate to English service.
- aonic 16y agoIt's the same Paul Butler that posted about A/B testing a CV http://paulbutler.org/archives/experiment-in-testing-my-resume/ http://paulbutler.org/archives/experiment-in-testing-my-resu...
- Aetius 16y agoOh, China, you are so dark...
- k3dz 16y agothis might not represent "real human relationships".. people playing games like mafia wars (45 million users) keep adding hundreds of other players as friends..
- clofresh 16y agoBeautiful. This belongs in the MoMA.
- yuxt 16y agolooks familiar http://www.masterresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/earth_night.jpg http://www.masterresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/ear...
- dfischer 16y agoThis is really amazing. Nice!
- Vivtek 16y agoLooks a little like that brief orbital shot of the Borg future Earth, doesn't it?
- oz 16y agoOr the Taelon Commonality, for Earth, Final Conflict fans.
- galapagos 16y agoAll that dark may be attributed to numerous things as alluded to already: lack of development, lack of human settlement, poverty, simply not on fb The border region between the Canadian prairie provinces and the American plains may be because the cities aren't smack against the border as in BC/WASH. or Ontario/NY etc. The few dots in NK could be those few expats or SK/foreign tourists, or NK operatives logging in. NK does have a twitter account. Anyway, the map is stunning and i think its a great visual of the inequalities, especially between Africa and the global North. It might also highlight the irrelevance of fb in regions where community (not the same as digitized "communication") is more necessary, strong and relevant to the life and survival mechanisms therein than costly technologies elsewhere.
- jonknee 16y ago> The few dots in NK could be those few expats or SK/foreign tourists, or NK operatives logging in. NK does have a twitter account. It's not based on IP, but based on self-stated resident city.
- galapagos 16y agoah, thanks. i guess we can exclude tourists then. could also be fans of the regime from outside of the country.. who knows.
- loganlinn 16y agoIt would be interesting to see this with full spectral progression
- brlewis 16y agoWhat I want to know is, were the 10MM pairs all people who make their friendship data public? For people in urban areas, this is sufficiently anonymous. But for those faint dots in the middle of nowhere, is it? I think very carefully before I reveal any information publicly about my users. Sometimes seemingly aggregate information isn't.
- siculars 16y agoRussians don't use Facbook. edit. I love this map. China and Russia are black holes.
- cma 16y agoBrazil is almost totally dark; Orkut effect?
- sundars 16y agoIts interesting to see many connections within India. Also India and countries in Western Asia seem more connected than India and US (which is what I was expecting assuming the FB population in India)
- sundarurfriend 16y ago>Its interesting to see many connections within India. The map is quite predictable to some extent too. Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata are clearly visible, and I think I see Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai as well, albeit as less brighter dots. Bangalore not being a bright dot is curious in itself - is it that people here are more networked with other cities and countries rather than within the city? >Also India and countries in Western Asia seem more connected than India and US (which is what I was expecting assuming the FB population in India) How do you see something like that? I found it pretty difficult to keep track of the lines. If that were true, it would be pretty interesting indeed.
- sundars 16y agoi see some bright lines between indian cities esp mumbai and the gulf region. btw, i wonder who you are....as you are also a Sundar
- chrisaycock 16y agoReally shows how entrenched the established players are in the emerging markets. Russia has VK (VKontakte), China has QQ (and supposedly blocks FB too), Brazil has Orkut. Makes me kind of admire Facebook for being able to take so much market share in Western Europe, despite home-grown alternatives there.
- mangool 16y agoSo beautiful
- Knack 16y agoInteresting. In Germany you can still distinct clearly the former eastern part, which has less facebook activity. You see the 'island' of Berlin, though. For your informaion: The union of Germany was 20 years ago... Anyway, I'm not a fan of facebook, google and the like, as it's not obvious that the consumer pays the big bill in the end. People think of great, free services but all the billions those company make come secretly from our pockets. (Via created consumer trends, higher prices that other companies can take due to the consumer information they buy from facebook)
- Loic 16y agoSomeone outside Facebook tried to do the same with a US map and was sued by Facebook. Data in, data out only for Facebook. http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/02/how-to-split-up-the-us.html http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/02/how-to-s...
- Retric 16y agoI think FB disliked his map because it showed how poor the connections between areas where. FB's map pretends that all areas are equal and focuses on the global nature of their network.
- sudont 16y agoNo, I believe it was because he tried to publish his dataset. As Loic said, "Data out only for Facebook." The worst part of the whole debacle was that Facebook's robots.txt file explicitly allowed the crawling of this data.
- Retric 16y agoI don't think your reading into the situation deep enough. FB changed their robots.txt file becaue they reolized they wanted to keep that information private. But, what caused them to want to make it private? Well the reality is: Looking at the network of US cities, it's been remarkable to see how groups of them form clusters, with strong connections locally but few contacts outside the cluster. vs this PR peice that says: It's not just a pretty picture, it's a reaffirmation of the impact we have in connecting people, even across oceans and borders. PS: Visualizing data is like photography. Instead of starting with a blank canvas, you manipulate the lens used to present the data from a certain angle. aka, To make something with the right look takes not just data but the correct manipulations of that data.
- bambax 16y agoWeird: Sardinia is much brighter than Corsica (density for Corsica (34 hab. per km2) is about half the density of Sardinia (70 hab. per km2), so I guess that explains it?) Weirder: Portugal (11M people, 114 hab. per km2) is much brighter than Spain (44M people, 93 hab. per km2): the difference in density does not seem to explain the difference on the map. Are Spaniards less social than the Portuguese?
- jkent 16y agoIn Spain, Tuenti is considerably more popular (Spanish equivalent of Facebook). This probably explains the density difference.
- dshankar 16y agoThey don't use Facebook in Russia? Jokes aside, this is an amazing marketing/hiring tool for Facebook. I hope they print this on billboards.
- davidk0101 16y agoSo where's Kevin Bacon?
- moe 16y agoHow about a real hi-res version, or a vectorized version, or dare I dream, the raw data? This looks pretty, but it'd be more interesting to me if I could explore it some.
- paganel 16y agoIt's interesting how sub-Saharan Africa is still a mostly dark continent. Also interesting are the connections between the Kurds from Turkey and those from present-day Iraq, and how people from Baghdad are still more or less connected to those from the northern parts of Iraq (there's still a major Sunni presence in there as far as I know).
- media7 16y agoHave they not already done that?
- sachbh 16y agowhy use euclidean distance in the function for defining weights? Doesn't it mean cities that are farther in distance with fewer friend connections would get a higher weight than cities that are close by? Not sure how it helps visualize or how to interpret it.
- jcl 16y agoPresumably they're using euclidean distance to scale down the brightness of long-distance links -- to ensure that long-distance relationships don't overpower short ones in the visualization. Otherwise, a pair of friends thousands of miles apart would be contributing the same "energy" to the image as a thousand pairs a few miles apart... You'd never be able to see local detail in the areas heavily crossed by global connections (e.g. the Caribbean).