Facebook recently released a stunning new map of world, a map which shows visualization of the 500 million users of the social networking site and the cyber “Friendships” they have helped create between cities.
The image was created using data from the firm’s massive Apache data warehouse. An initial sample of 10 million friend pairs was used. The data was correlated with cities and mapped using the longitude and latitude location of each city, thus creating a perfect virtual map of the world.
Paul Butler, the Facebook intern behind the image, wrote on the company’s blog: “I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. I wanted a visualization that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them”
‘It was clear that I had too much data to get interesting results just by drawing lines. I thought that making the lines semi-transparent would do the trick, but I quickly realized that my graphing environment couldn't handle enough shades of color for it to work the way I wanted.’
The theme is simple, the stronger the bond the thicker the line between two cites. A simple color chart of three basic colors black, blue and white is utilized, with blue representing modest and white representing the “heaviest” friendship pairs.
Paul Butler further added: 'After a few minutes of rendering, the new plot appeared, and I was a bit taken aback by what I saw. The blob had turned into a surprisingly detailed map of the world. Not only were continents visible, certain international borders were apparent as well”
'I replaced the lines with great circle arcs, which are the shortest routes between two points on the Earth. Because the Earth is a sphere, these are often not straight lines on the projection.
'When I shared the image with others within Facebook, it resonated with many people. It's not just a pretty picture, it's a reaffirmation of the impact we have in connecting people, even across oceans and borders.'
Last week Time magazine named Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Person of the Year. Indeed, Facebook and its founders have come a long way. Besides creating friendship is proving to be a very lucrative business, for as the year draws to a close, Facebook is close to reporting revenues of $2 billion for 2010; $1 billion more then what was previously expected.
