This is the visualization of my personal ‘social network’, based on my Facebook friends in early 2013. Each colored dot represents a Facebook friend and each line between two dots represents a connection. In other words, these people know each other. The bigger a dot, the more connections the person has within the network. The color indicates the number of connections from a cold blue (no connections) to a warm orange (many connections). Dots with connections attract each other and unconnected dots are pushed away. This creates the characteristic clusters. By looking at the people in each cluster, it’s really easy to identify the corresponding group. They are mostly based on location (cities and countries) as well as “common interest” in the sense of university, church or the like.
How did you do this?
I used a combination of the following tools to create the vizualization:
- Facebook with the netvizz app to get the data
- Gephi to vizualize the data
- Adobe Illustrator to tweak the final design and add the captions
Here’s the tutorial that I followed:
