Visualization of Social Networking

Looking at the graphs on the article on Obesity by Christakis and Fowler, I've realized that I've always only thought of social networking as a series of status updates, tweets, and comments. I've never thought of social networking as something other than an online phenomenon, an idea that was immediately disproved during class. In all of the numerous studies that I've read, online and offline, I don't remember a single one showing a graph of the subjects and their relation to one another. The relation between subjects never seemed important to me, as test subjects always seemed to be random. Over all my years of reading studies, I have only seen one significant graph of a social network, and it didn't come from a study...

A few years ago , as Facebook began allowing developers to write web applications for Facebook users, one developer released an app called Friend Wheel. This app was specifically designed to visually represent the connections between your Facebook friends. Each of your friends are placed around a circle in an optimal location, where a line is drawn in between each mutual friendship. My Friend Wheel can be found here (hopefully the link works). As you can see, the large group of connections in the top left is mostly comprised of people from my high school, where everyone pretty much added everyone else as friends, and the smaller group on the bottom represents people from Northeastern, where people seemed to be slightly more hesitant about adding people they don't know as well.

As several of my Facebook friends started to add the application and post their "wheels" on their walls, I decided to try it out. Nonetheless, I was very intrigued at first sight, as I had never seen a network graph before. After not seeing my wheel for years, I went back to it today, and was surprised at how much it had grown since I have gone to college. However, knowing more about networks, I feel that it could be more accurate if new features such as strong and weak ties were incorporated, as it could be a very simple, one click replacement for more complicated software like Visone.