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