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Social Graphs. How are you connected? Posted By: Thomas Shaw, 7:24pm Sunday 06 September 2009

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Most of us have a profile on social networking websites such as Facebook or LinkedIn.  But have you ever considered graphing your contacts interconnectivity? Before creating a social graph, we need to understand more about social graph theory and types of social graphs.

A graph is a collection of vertices (or nodes) and edges between them. The vertices are abstract nodes and edges represent some sort of relationship between them. In the case of a social network the vertices are people and the edges represent a kind of social or person-to-person relationship. eg. friends of, married to, worked with or went to school with. All these are all examples of possible relationships that could determine edges in a social graph.

These graphs help us visualise data and provides a simple way of interrupting this information. Have a look at other examples at Visual Complexity.

In the example below using TouchGraph's Facebook Browser, my network of friends graph highlights the various friend relationships. The program determines the clusters/cliques your friends belong to and uses different colors to show each clique. Cliques are characterised by having lots of friendships within a group of friends and few connections to members outside the group.

When will we see a social graph using data from LinkedIn?





Article URL: http://www.recruitmentdirectory.com.au/Blog/social-graphs-how-are-you-connected-a262.html

Article Tags: touchgraph facebook facebook.com connections friends groups linkedin linkedin.com six degrees of separation social graph theory social graphs interconnectivity facebook application data visualisation social networks

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