Skip to main content

Creating Facebook Network Graphs

I found out about Neo4j in Mark Jackson's blog and then found this post by a Neo4j employee explaining how to chart your Facebook network of friends step by step. Not all the steps worked for me, which is probably for the better, since I had to learn cypher (the Neo4j querying language) to complete the chart.

I found a few (semi) interesting facts:

- For every direct connection I have there are 10 additional connections between my friends.

- I share over half of my connections with my wife. Though this is not bi-directional, she has many more connections than me. In the picture below I am the red dot in the middle and my wife is the red dot at the far right. Every dot between the two of us is a shared connection, while dots to my  left, above and below are only mine connections.


- Most of my fiends are clustered in neat silos. This picture is a network diagram of about half of my Facebook connections. I am colored red, my wife is colored orange and other colored clusters that are not blue represent unique groups (e.g. friends from school, from work, family)
I am not all too interested in researching Facebook fiends. The interesting part is experiencing network technology that's valuable in recommendation engines, fraud detectors and social applications. Next up, I'll compare my Facebook network graph with LinkedIn.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

AA Problem

AA stands for Attention Allocation not Alcoholic Anonymous. Sorry for the deceiving eye catcher. PTT presentation is work I did in 2005 in the purely abstract edges of Operation Research. I uploaded a PPT presentation. The presentation is lighter and more colorful than the actual article. Warning you have to be a bit of a geek to press the link above. For the super geeks I put a link to the full article. It’s called “Attention Allocation to Partially Observable Heterogeneous Customers – with Imperfect Treatment”, Catchy? Full AA Problem article

Digital Life - Art of Display

TNS, a market research firm, conducted an extensive research on the use of mobile, internet applications and social media around the world. What's really cool about it, more than the findings themselves, is the way the findings are presented. Sometimes, visualization is what matters most. http://discoverdigitallife.com/

SDM from up on the bridge

I am taking the first spring semester as a long distance student in MIT's System Design and Managment (SDM) program. The long distance option, which I am grateful for, poses some challenges. A month into the semester, I am still trying to improve the interaction with the classroom, faculty and fellow students and maintain a balance between school and work. Setting up a work station I am using my home office (/living room /dining room/ guest sofa) from which I connect to the ‘bridge’. I find it useful to work with two screens. One displays the class, the mike controls and my video (I want to see how I appear to people looking at me from the classroom). The other displays the presentation slides and notebook (OneNote). The webcam is positioned above the main screen and when I look at the other screen, I am not facing the webcam. Class participation The video and sound quality are good. Material is always available before hand on the web. So keeping up with the studies is eas...