JoelNothman.com

After hesitantly accepting a few and later removing them, I’ve generally avoided the craze of Facebook applications. While I could imagine great potential for them, without more centralisation, most are highly redundant and plain annoying.

Nonetheless, I have for a long time wanted to know the relationships between my friends on Facebook. I.e., who of my friends know each other? More so, who is a common friend of a lot of my friends, but is not listed as my own?

The application that I saw on my friend Ariella’s page piqued my interest in analysis of the social network. That is the Friend Wheel. It plots on a circle the interconnections between one’s friends. Well, up to 400 of one’s friends, so it ?randomly excluded a few handfuls of mine when drawing the graph (sorry if that includes you!).

Annoyingly, it does not produce a very usable or analysable format, especially when your network of friends is large, but it does perform some clustering. So I decided to take the produced chart, and (unneatly) label some of the clusters I could identify… Have a look! Nothing too surprising, really, and more often the outliers—the ones that don’t get clustered in among others—are the interesting cases, and I haven’t made the effort to mark them.

(And if making this chart available is a privacy concern for some, please let me know.)