Facebook friends network map

[Joff]

A discussion in the office earlier went along the lines of "isn't it a small world" when we realised we've all found friends of friends that know people we know.

This got me thinking, has Facebook ever published a network map of all it's users, showing how each link to each other in a big spidery mess? If not then it's a shame as I'd be interested to see how all the nodes were linked (no need to see any personal details, just a graph will do).

[bumfluff]

Originally Posted by Joff

A discussion in the office earlier went along the lines of "isn't it a small world" when we realised we've all found friends of friends that know people we know.

This got me thinking, has Facebook ever published a network map of all it's users, showing how each link to each other in a big spidery mess? If not then it's a shame as I'd be interested to see how all the nodes were linked (no need to see any personal details, just a graph will do).

According to their own stats, there's 70 million users... it'd be a massive map

I think they'd have to be very careful if they did do something like that, though. Even if they only showed a username or image in the map, there'd be a risk of a person 'engineering' friendships in order to reach a particular person. If you think about the number of teens who use the site, that'd be a massive risk, both morally and legally.

[Joff]

Yeah, I'm not fussed with seeing usernames or images, just the map. There were a couple of similar Internet maps on ThinkGeek.com a while ago.

[TWD-Tony]

TouchGraph does a Facebook mapping tool http://www.touchgraph.com/TGFacebookBrowser.html

[Joff]

That's pretty much what I'm after, cheers.

Not keen on the whole application thing but it's probably the only way you can achieve it outside of Facebook's control.