Every once in a while I think of a project and just have to pull something together to satisfy my own inner-geekiness. This was one of those projects.
In my humble opinion, few images are as personal and as striking as the visualization of an individual’s social network. These are constructed in such a manner that an individual’s friends are displayed in an image or a dynamic application and the connections between them are visualized. Traditionally, it can be difficult to gather the data necessary to identify an individual’s friends and the relationships among friends; however, social networking websites (such as Myspace.com, Friendster.com, and Facebook.com) have been collecting this information for the past few years. Facebook recently began providing developers access to their databases and, in effect, gave developers the ability to create a map of an individual’s personal relationships. Since then, developers have been taking advantage of these newfound sources of information in order to provide Facebook users with fun and interesting “applications” for their personal profiles.
