The Nexus Friend Grapher taps into your Facebook social connections and, with a couple clicks of the mouse, maps them out spatially. In short, it's really, really cool. The Grapher uses the nature of your and your friends connections to one another to chart out how closely — in what ways — you're interconnected. I found it to be an almost frighteningly accurate representation of my social history, going all they way back to about the sixth grade, New Jersey circa 1989. Facebook certainly does know a tremendous amount about us and our places in the universe, which really becomes clear when you ask it questions like we're doing here.

The brightest constellation on the right side of the display is made up of what I might loosely term my Washington DC crowd. That is, people I either worked with or regularly drank beers with after work back when I was living in the District. You'll notice that connections between nodes there run every which way, connecting everyone to everyone else. That closely matches how things are in real life, where you regularly have conversations that go, "Do you know Bob? Oh, of course you know Bob!" Most of that crowd knows much of the rest of that crowd. And to the top and right of that blob are my Waxman people, representing my time spent on Capitol Hill.

The bright star that attaches that dominant group to that second largest network on the left is my partner, Jane. Flowing off of Janie are all of her family, her hometown friends, and our mutual friends here in New York. Flowing up and to the left of that are my old high school friends. The inner band represents my core group of fellow troublemakers in my graduating class. Slightly farther out of the center is a second band made up of those good friends from, mostly, graduating years other than my own. To the left and below are a smattering of people with whom I kicked it back in grammar school. Making up the outer ring of that area of the chart are what we used to call "school friends," those people who you got on well with but only really had a social connection between the hours of eight o'clock and two o'clock each day.

And that, in a chart, is more or less my first three decades of social existence. Get your own here. It's pretty neat.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 4:34 pm and is filed under data, visualizations, writing. 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.