My social network on Friendfeed

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):

My FOAF network on Friendfeed

My FOAF network on Friendfeed

The most influential nodes in my network are (no surprises for me):

  1. scobleizer
  2. techcrunch
  3. loic
  4. steverubel
  5. louisgray
  6. davew
  7. metaroll (this is because it’s my FOAF network)
  8. jasoncalacanis
  9. petecashmore
  10. factoryjoe

Anyone knows whether there is a nice network visualization toolkit that I could use to build a dynamic application?

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Comments (3)

  1. Andrew Baron wrote::

    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.

    Sunday, August 3, 2008 at 1:18 pm #
  2. Benedikt wrote::

    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.

    Sunday, August 3, 2008 at 2:21 pm #
  3. Susan Beebe wrote::

    neat!! I’d love to pass my FF account thru that app!

    FF = susanbeebe

    Thanks!
    Susan

    Sunday, August 3, 2008 at 10:16 pm #

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  1. FFSixDegrees - take a closer look at your Friendfeed network < life under electronic conditions on Sunday, August 3, 2008 at 3:36 pm

    […] life under electronic conditions by benedikt koehler < My social network on Friendfeed […]