visualise your facebook social network

  my friendwheel 
  Originally uploaded by robinhamman

I've just discovered Friend Wheel, a new Facebook application that allows you to visualise your social network. Often times tools like this are just a bit of fun - last year I had a go at using a similar tool to visualise the technorati top 5 to see if we could learn anything about what makes them successful from the structure of links, once visible (I couldn't see anything).

Friendwheel, on the other hand, surprised me by spitting out a pretty picture showing all the connections between people in my social network. What's interesting is how various groups of my facebook friends appear as clusters on the visualisation so, in my case, you can see clusters of BBC World Service people, Journalism Bloggers, people with an interest  in "Social Media and Civic Society", etc.

I've posted my friendwheel with extensive notes on flickr...

[update: I should also point out Martin Stabe's interesting use of a del.iciou.us network visualiser to see the connections between UK journo bloggers (including myself).]

Comments

[Joanna]

What a great find - it's really interesting info and I love the way it's displayed. Out of the Facebook apps I've tried this is the first one I've actually liked and will probably keep on my profile page. Your contacts are much better inter-connected than mine though - most of my Friend Wheel is white space!

[Robin Hamman]

Hi Joanna,
Nice to see you back! Do befriend me on facebook if you get the chance - link beneath the linkedin button at the top left.

Mike Butcher has an even greater level of link density than I do: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mbites/661293024/

I really like the way that it has pointed out groupings of people, for example my cluster of BBC people who all worked on bbc.co.uk back in around 1999 and also the "women uk media bloggers" at the top left of my circle.

Did you find anything like this with yours?

:-)
Robin.

[Joanna]

It's all fairly predictable stuff with mine - there are clear groupings from school, university and different places I've worked. But that reflects the fact that my Facebook contacts are skewed towards social contacts (as opposed to LinkedIn, where it's mainly professional). The lines are definitely blurring though.

A friend request is on its way!

[Ilana]

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