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.

Facebook Places – the much talked about new venture from the social media giant – isl an offering that may add significant value to the Facebook users’ experience.

Recently launched in the UK, ‘Places’ utilises the GPS system of any smartphone to identify your location and then enables you to tag yourself there, so communicating your location with the rest of your FB friends at any given moment. It also enables you to tag your friends in places you visit and view their comments on your location.

This feature has great scope for lifestyle brands like Red Bull, facilitating whole communities to connect at events and engage with the brand.

Inevitably there will be further questions of privacy raised with the addition of ‘Places’, but ultimately the generation it will appeal to already consider their habits to be public information and distribute it not just willingly but eagerly.

With this in mind, ‘Places’ may finally be the lucrative marketing tool Facebook has been looking for to finally fulfil its business promise.

www.facebook.com/places/

Monday saw the Mashable and 92Y conference get into full swing in New York.

The summit was aimed at utilising social media to achieve the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) set to be completed by 2015 to solve key problems in the developing world such as gender inequality and child mortality.

Instead of merely understanding the incremental changes social media can bring, the summit aimed to address the global power of social networks to act as a catalyst for new ideas and initiatives that might help bring about social change.

The speakers at the event all had an acute understanding of the power which innovation and communication yields and the ability it has to change the world – a belief demonstrated perfectly when 24 year old Mashable founder Pete Cashmore interviewed American Media moghul and creator of CNN, Ted Turner.

The Cable News Network was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage in the US and in so doing entirely altered the way the global community, especially business, viewed the world, as news came thick and fast from situations across the globe – not only bringing the world closer together but making it more interdependent.

Social Media and initiatives like Mashable have taken up the baton of innovation in communication as they continue this stream of information and help to facilitate an even closer global community and this summit aimed to utilise this global community for change and social good not just social interaction

The results of the conference are yet to be seen but some glimmers of progress emerged in the conference itself such as when Facebook Co-founder Chris Hughes announced he was already in the process of developing a social network specifically aimed at connecting non-profit organisations, who knows what other social good will emerge from this event.

Mashable/ Social Good