How does my second order social network on Friendfeed look like? A network analytical exploration.
As the six degrees of separation experiment by Stanley Milgram went through press and social media again, I thought it would be nice to visualize my Friendfeed connections. I wrote a quick php hack that downloaded all my connections and my friends’ connections (FOAF) and cached them.
A few numbers: I have 343 first order connections that connect me to another 16038 Friendfeed users. All in all my FOAF network includes 16381 nodes. Quite a few second order connections.
It doesn’t require much imagination that a network of this size cannot be visualized completely, so I ordered the nodes and just used the 71 most prominent by the number of people in my second degree network linking to them. The resulting picture looks like this (click to enlarge):
The most influential nodes in my network are (no surprises for me):
- scobleizer
- techcrunch
- loic
- steverubel
- louisgray
- davew
- metaroll (this is because it’s my FOAF network)
- jasoncalacanis
- petecashmore
- factoryjoe
Anyone knows whether there is a nice network visualization toolkit that I could use to build a dynamic application?
Comments (3)
What factors did you use to detemine which are most influential?
I woudl suggest that just because Scobelizer has the largest circle, its not clear if he is the most influential due to his close proximity to the center, where its easier to be popular and could muddy a quality like influence. From this graph’s data, taking both factors into consideration, the definition of the most influential person is more likely determined by who has the largest circle, the furthest from the center.
Andrew, for this analysis I used the indegrees, the number of connections that link to a certain person. In social network analysis there are many other ways to measure influence, e.g. centrality.
neat!! I’d love to pass my FF account thru that app!
FF = susanbeebe
Thanks!
Susan
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