A New World Order – The Global Map According to Facebook Friendships
Interdirect loves this image of the world created through Facebook friendship links. There are no borders, coastlines or country definitions and yet it is incredibly similar to a conventionally drawn world map - apart from the significant absence of the not-so-social-media friendly China and Russia!
Paul Butler, who developed the map, was interested by the locality of friendship and wanted to create a visualisation of the cities in the world which had friendship between them.
He began by taking a sample of roughly 10 million pairs of friends from the data warehouse Apache Hive and combining it with each user’s current city and summed the number of friends between each, eventually giving each line between cities a weight to reflect this. Finally he merged the data with the longitude and latitude coordinates with the city and wrapped some of the lines around the “world”, resulting in this truly mesmerising image.
Read the full explanation here.
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