Sites like Facebook are proving the value of the “social graph”
From MITS Technology Review by Erica Naone, (Web Link).
A great article which looks at how you can represent a persons social graph - a person’s network of friends, family, and acquaintances.
The Blogosphere
Matthew Hurst, a scientist at Microsoft’s Live Labs, used a search tool, called Blogpulse, to generate visualizations of the blogosphere.
Credit Matthew Hurst (blog) via Technology Review (Web Link)
Hurst describes the cluster at the centre as a core which is basically a group of a few thousand blogs with links to and from other sites. Interestingly you can see other smaller blogging communities connecting to the core. The links are one-way and are produced when an obscure blog links to a well-known blog at the core.
The article also includes another image which shows a core made up of several thousand popular blogs which are heavily connected to one another. What�s really interesting is that the core divides into two regions: one relating to political blogs the other focused on gadgets and technology. The two areas bind together through popular blogs with interests in both subject areas. What�s really fascinating is that Hurst noted a difference in culture between the two areas in that reciprocal two way links are much denser among the political blogs than they are among the technology blogs.
Comment Flow
Correctly the article notes that maps of social networks usually show an the fact that two users have linked to each other’s profiles. And in this sense the maps have little meaning, as the article notes MySpace users can have 100s of such links. However Dietmar �Offenhuber, a research assistant at the MIT Media Lab, together with associate professor Judith �Donath has created a comment flow visualization which traces communication between users rather than links. The visualisation is based on where and how often users left comments for other users. As the article notes �Offenhuber says the tool can help users assess the communication habits of prospective friends at a glance�.
Credit: Dietmar Offenhuber, Judith Donath, MIT Sociable Media Group via Technology Review (Web Link)
Twitter Social Network
This is a great visualisation of the twitter network and it focuses again on communication but also on the TYPE of communication. According to Akshay Java, a member of the eBiquity Research Group at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, communication on the microblogging site Twitter falls into three purposes: finding information, sharing information, and having conversations. Each type of communication results in a different network. One way communication such as news sources form huge nodes while mutual communication based on sharing and receiving information form smaller nodes which are closer together resulting in a tightly knit network. See the article for images.
Atlas
I like this. IBM’s Atlas maps social networks in the workplace. It looks at �users’ connections on the basis of their relative positions within the company and their communications by e-mail and instant messenger�. So the element of frequency of communication is included which means that some contacts appear or vanish over time as communication with them ebbs and flows. . The map shows contacts together with a visualisation of how close they are to you. Close contacts are near the centre while distant ones are toward the perimeter. From a business perspective this can be used for staff to maintain their professional networks. For instance you might see a particular contact drifting toward the perimeter prompting you to contact them before the connection vanishes. See the article for images.
A great article with many more visualisations. Well worth a read (Web Link).
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