Someone outside Facebook tried to do the same with a US map and was sued by Facebook. Data in, data out only for Facebook.<p><a href="http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/02/how-to-split-up-the-us.html" rel="nofollow">http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/02/how-to-s...</a>
If you're interested: Russia is missing because we've got one <i>very</i> similar social network[1][2] that's got arguably more features and arrived to the market a year or so earlier than facebook got its russian localization.<p>[1] <a href="http://vk.com" rel="nofollow">http://vk.com</a><p>[2] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vkontakte" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vkontakte</a>
<i>backgroundify!</i> (removed branding, resized to 1920x1200): <a href="http://s3.amazonaws.com/fb-world-image/fb-worldmap.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://s3.amazonaws.com/fb-world-image/fb-worldmap.jpg</a><p>The US / Canadian border in the West is interesting. It seems between west of the great lakes and east of Seattle there isn't much connection across the border.
It's the same Paul Butler that posted about A/B testing a CV <a href="http://paulbutler.org/archives/experiment-in-testing-my-resume/" rel="nofollow">http://paulbutler.org/archives/experiment-in-testing-my-resu...</a>
It's really interesting that you can clearly see the differences between West Germany from East Germany, even 20 years after the reunification. Also the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 80 years after the end of the World War I.<p>I also wonder who those users in North Korea are.
What I want to know is, were the 10MM pairs all people who make their friendship data public? For people in urban areas, this is sufficiently anonymous. But for those faint dots in the middle of nowhere, is it?<p>I think very carefully before I reveal any information publicly about my users. Sometimes seemingly aggregate information isn't.
Seems to comply pretty well with this <a href="http://www.vincos.it/world-map-of-social-networks/" rel="nofollow">http://www.vincos.it/world-map-of-social-networks/</a><p>Notice the conspicuous absence of China, Russia and Brazil.
the lack of china is pretty interesting. russia is practically non-existent too, but it's much larger (especially with this map projection) with a much smaller population.
How about a real hi-res version, or a vectorized version, or dare I dream, the raw data?<p>This looks pretty, but it'd be more interesting to me if I could explore it some.
All that dark may be attributed to numerous things as alluded to already: lack of development, lack of human settlement, poverty, simply not on fb<p>The border region between the Canadian prairie provinces and the American plains may be because the cities aren't smack against the border as in BC/WASH. or Ontario/NY etc.<p>The few dots in NK could be those few expats or SK/foreign tourists, or NK operatives logging in. NK does have a twitter account.<p>Anyway, the map is stunning and i think its a great visual of the inequalities, especially between Africa and the global North. It might also highlight the irrelevance of fb in regions where community (not the same as digitized "communication") is more necessary, strong and relevant to the life and survival mechanisms therein than costly technologies elsewhere.
Interesting. In Germany you can still distinct clearly the former eastern part, which has less facebook activity. You see the 'island' of Berlin, though. For your informaion: The union of Germany was 20 years ago...<p>Anyway, I'm not a fan of facebook, google and the like, as it's not obvious that the consumer pays the big bill in the end. People think of great, free services but all the billions those company make come secretly from our pockets. (Via created consumer trends, higher prices that other companies can take due to the consumer information they buy from facebook)
Weird: Sardinia is much brighter than Corsica (density for Corsica (34 hab. per km2) is about half the density of Sardinia (70 hab. per km2), so I guess that explains it?)<p>Weirder: Portugal (11M people, 114 hab. per km2) is much brighter than Spain (44M people, 93 hab. per km2): the difference in density does not seem to explain the difference on the map. Are Spaniards less social than the Portuguese?
this might not represent "real human relationships".. people playing games like mafia wars (45 million users) keep adding hundreds of other players as friends..
Its interesting to see many connections within India. Also India and countries in Western Asia seem more connected than India and US (which is what I was expecting assuming the FB population in India)
It's interesting how sub-Saharan Africa is still a mostly dark continent.
Also interesting are the connections between the Kurds from Turkey and those from present-day Iraq, and how people from Baghdad are still more or less connected to those from the northern parts of Iraq (there's still a major Sunni presence in there as far as I know).
Really shows how entrenched the established players are in the emerging markets. Russia has VK (VKontakte), China has QQ (and supposedly blocks FB too), Brazil has Orkut. Makes me kind of admire Facebook for being able to take so much market share in Western Europe, despite home-grown alternatives there.
Neat. It is interesting how similar this rendering is to Chris Harrison's city-to-city map: <a href="http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/InternetMap/medium/worldBlack.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/InternetMap/medium/wor...</a>
Were it possible to gather the data, it'd be interesting to see a breakdown of how the connections were made. I'm curious whether more were a result of travel/temporary visits or relocation/permanent moves.
why use euclidean distance in the function for defining weights? Doesn't it mean cities that are farther in distance with fewer friend connections would get a higher weight than cities that are close by? Not sure how it helps visualize or how to interpret it.