Skip to main content



Social Networks: A Visual Case Study

In our course of study, we have delved upon the basics of networks and graphs. A graph, at its basic definition, is a series of nodes- which can represent anything from people to cities- that are interconnected by a set of edges, which represent some sort of relationship. Graphs play a huge role in our everyday life, especially with the advent of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

Modern graph theory, especially in fields such as computer science and operations research has become extremely complex; much research has been dedicated to the visualization of graphs- especially when it comes to the relationship between people.

fizz

One interesting visualization- called Fizz (http://fizz.bloom.io/) takes your Facebook information and visualizes it in a network of colorful bubbles- the larger bubbles represent a person and the smaller bubbles represent status updates. By glancing at this visualization, one can gain an idea of who his/her most active friends are. In class, we talked about friend recommendations and how these recommendations are calculated. Certainly, there are dozens of factors that can go into calculating recommendations, and the same concept can be applied to a visualization such as Fizz- how do you think the bubbles’ color, size and number are generated?

Another very interesting visualization shows Facebook’s actions that occur in real-time, geo-located to their location on a globe.

fb

What’s incredibly remarkable, as explained in the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neAAzVquaRU&feature=related

is that this Facebook visualization is very similar to a NASA photo of the earth from outer space- the more active Facebook regions are also the regions that are more physically lit, and therefore have access to modern technology.

fb2

Here we can see a mesh trail of Facebook interactions- a snapshot of how users are interacting with each other across the globe. The different colored trails represent different kinds of interactions, but they could easily represent things like weak and strong connections within a graph. Hundreds of thousands of these connections are being made each second- so many, that its virtually impossible to not have some sort of connection to another person within 5 or 6 steps (6 degrees of separation). I bet you can’t name two of your best friends at Cornell that haven’t at least heard of the other person. I’ve found that in the real world, the property of Strong Triadic Closure – depending on how you define a strong and weak connection- holds true in almost all cases (in the same geographic location, at least). These visualizations provide clear evidence that the world is becoming more interconnected every day.

From these visualizations arise an infinite number of possibilities for real applications- from analyzing demographic changes and infrastructure to keeping track of criminal growth (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H97prT3cX0) and even things like tracking the subprime mortgage lending crisis. Social networking is an extremely powerful tool that will continue to evolve as our technological capabilities increase.

Comments

Leave a Reply

Blogging Calendar

September 2011
M T W T F S S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
2627282930  

Archives