Visualizing Friendships Using Facebook's Social Graph

Paul Butler, a Facebook developer looks at a data visualization exploring the locality of friends.

"When the data is the social graph of 500 million people, there are a lot of lenses through which you can view it. One that piqued my curiosity was the locality of friendship. 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."

Read more and find a high res image here:

• Visualizing Friendship

Follow: A New AddThis Labs Experiment

This morning we released a new feature in AddThis Labs called AddThis Follow. You've probably noticed "Follow us on Facebook..." and similar links on various websites you've visited. We thought we'd offer our AddThis publishers an easy way to not only quickly add this feature to their site, but also track clickthroughs to their social profiles right in their AddThis analytics console.

I've added my own Follow menu to this blog, over on the right side of the page.

This new feature supports social profiles on Facebook, Twitter, RSS, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, YouTube and Flickr. Once visitors start using it, I'll be able to go to my AddThis.com analytics, switch from "Sharing" to "Subscribe/Follow" data and track how my visitors are connecting to my various social media profiles.

We'd love to hear what you think of this experiment; would you use it? Are there things you would add or change? Give us your feedback in the AddThis Follow forum.

Get a Follow menu for your own site here:

• AddThis Follow Labs Experiment

Read more:

• Justin Thorp's official blog post

Are humans the new Google?

Can human-driven search from companies like Facebook and Amazon beat algorithmic search giant Google? Interesting reading:

How Facebook Plans to Kill Google (GOOG)

Facebook: Facts You Probably Didn't Know (via Mashable)

Read more at Mashable:

• Facebook: Facts You Probably Didn't Know [INFOGRAPHIC]

Why Hasn't Location Reached the Mainstream Yet?

In spite of apps like Foursquare and Yelp, location based personalization hasn't really been embraced by the public at large. This Mashable article asks why, exploring privacy concerns as a key issue and positing that Facebook and Twitter may be the catalysts for a broader acceptable of these types of technologies.

Read more:

• Why Hasn't Location Reached the Mainstream Yet?

Making Facebook More Usable

This is one designer's vision for redesigning Facebook's interface. Beautiful work: Facebook Facelift

How would you improve Facebook's interface? Or, even better, Twitter? Great exercises in web application design.

Shared via AddThis; hat tip to Jeff

Nice mashup: GoPublic

This site is a mix of information from Facebook and Twitter all centered around Public Transportation. Great example of the power of bringing together different kinds of social media about one topic.

GoPublic

Shared via AddThis