The Nexus Facebook social network visualizer is pretty cool, and the best implemented one that I have seen. It does what you would expect it to: displays the relationships between you and your facebook friends. The output graph is really good looking and useful. Mine is shown below.

There are a few different clusters I notice here: one of high school friends, one of friends from a student group, and one from people I know through blogging. The main cluster is people I see fairly often in every day life.

While looking at these graphs is really interesting and can reveal some connections, I would like to see makers of applications like this take it one step further and add the possibility of analysis.

I am not saying get all geeky and give back betweenness centrality scores or anything like that, but give some indication of how those scores are meaningful to an average Joe. Show how influential a person might be, or how clued in to your circle a person might be. These things are not always obvious and some easy analysis can give people new information that they can act on.

Alternately, it would be nice to be able to download a file readable by a network analysis application so that one can do it on their own.

Either way it would help people understand that these graphs, while often stimulating, only give half the story and when properly analyzed, can be far more instructive about the roles and interests of people within your network.

[via information aesthetics]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.