After yesterday’s post about Twitter, today we’ll be talking about Facebook. After all, there are over 800 million users all over the planet, and since the launch of Google+, a lot of changes have been happening in the world’s largest social network. Simply Measured, Soda Head, Online Dating, Pagemodo and Social Media Explorer break down the impact of some of those changes, and show a lot of new facts behind Facebook users.
Daytum, the information tracking startup founded by the famous info-designer Nicholas Felton, has been acquired by Facebook.
Daytum is at least the third New York-based company Facebook has acquired, and its founders will be moving west to join the Facebook product design team at its headquarters.
I wonder if this means we’ll see yet another redesign of the Facebook interface, embracing some of Felton’s famously minimalistic design.
via Facebook Acquires Daytum for Product Design Team | Liz Gannes | NetworkEffect | AllThingsD.
Paul Butler got a lot of popularity from his beautiful Facebook Relationship graph, but surprised many people when he let it slip that he made the whole thing using R. Known as a statistics and analysis package, the thought that it could create graphs like that was unexpected. In a new blog post, he covers how he did it.
The solution was to manipulate the drawing order of the lines. I used a simple loop over my data to draw the lines, so it was easy to control which lines are drawn first using order(). I created an ordering based on the length of the lines, so that longer lines were drawn “behind” the shorter, more local lines. Then I used colorRampPalette() to generate a color palette from black to blue to white, and colored the lines according to order they were drawn.
via Visualizing Facebook Friends: Eye Candy in R | Paul Butler.
Facebook staffer Paul Butler has created this beautiful map of the millions (billions?) of friendships stored in the social network, using something that looks like edge bundles to create the beautiful map.
Butler started by using a sample of 10 million friend pairs, correlated them with their current cities and then mapped that data using the longitude and latitude of each city.
That was the easy part. Creating the right effect to show connecting relationships between thousands of cities proved to be a challenge.
Follow the link for the full-size graphic.
Some MySpace engineers have defected and taken their social network expertise to create a new web application called ‘Gravity‘ which attempts to determine your interests from your FaceBook and Twitter streams, and then help you connect with other like-minded individuals.
The company’s ultimate aim is twofold. For users, they can see who, in any given network, actually shares their interests. “For example, if a user tweets about an Interpol concert, the band would show up in their visualization, allowing them to connect to others that share that interest,” says Anand. (Just imagine the possibilities for a dating site.)
In particular, I like their graph visualizations that they call ‘Gravity Interest Graph’. The real factor behind their success or failure, tho, probably lies in the accuracy of their predictions on Interests.
Gaming on Social Networks like FaceBook is all the rage these days, with games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars bringing in millions to their parent companies. However, you only have to play one of these games for a few minutes to see the recurring theme: Flash based, “Click a button”, very repetitive. They tap into core psychological principles (detailed in gory depth all over the internet) to keep you coming back, but the visuals aren’t one of those core principles.
That’s about to change thanks to Dassault Systemes and their 3DVIA branch, who are bringing a new 3D Gaming Engine and 1-click publishing to FaceBook. The 3DVIA Product has been around for a few years, I’ve seen it at multiple SIGGRAPHS now, and every time they have a great little game you can play in their booth that was created by a team of 2-3 people in a mere matter of a few weeks, truly showing how simple they’ve made the creation process. Now, you can take those games and use the new “One Click Publishing” Feature to push them directly to FaceBook.
The 3DVIA Player application for Facebook takes advantage of the free 3D hosting service available to users of 3DVIA Studio, a powerful 3D development engine, and 3DVIA Scenes, an online, consumer-friendly, drag-and-drop 3D creation tool for building interactive applications. Both products publish easily to an online viewer page on 3DVIA.com equipped with a “Play on Facebook” button. Clicking this button launches the application on Facebook, which can then be shared through wall posts or a dedicated URL within the 3DVIA Player application. More advanced users can use the sample Web code and tutorial provided to embed applications directly in their own developer profiles.
And to show how powerful it is, this year’s SIGGRAPH game ‘Billions’ is now online for all to enjoy. In classic social fashion, run around collecting the “Mogaloos” before time runs out, competing for high score against your friends. Made by ZOINK Games, it’s an impressive demonstration of the 3DVIA Technology:
“‘Billions’ is an excellent example of what 3DVIA Studio is capable of and supports our mission to empower anyone to create and communicate in 3D,” said Lynne Wilson, CEO, 3DVIA, Dassault Systèmes. “In just a few short months, a very small development team built and published a visually-stunning, fully 3D application that runs in real-time on Facebook Platform. This is the future of game development.”
You can play Billions on FaceBook at http://apps.facebook.com/playbillions, or visit their website at http://billions.3dvia.com .
Read both press releases after the break.
Fitzgerald Steele was fascinated by Paul Adam’s (not the VizWorld Author, rather the Google UX Researcher) presentation on “The Real Life Social Network” where he presents the differences between real-life groups and social groups and how they are typically presented in online social networks. Taking some tips from the presentation and publicly available information on pulling your social graph from FaceBook, he rendered some pretty impressive network graphs of his own FaceBook social network which reinforces Paul’s claims.
- Facebook turns out to be a pretty decent proxy for my offline social network. If someone were to ask me, as Google did in their social network user research, to identify my people, place them in groups, and name the groups, this is pretty much the list I would’ve come up with.
- I’ve got more than 10 people in most of my groups. However, this graph doesn’t really take into account the strength of the connections. If I were to apply a filter to this graph that only showed people who posted on my wall, or who’s wall I posted on recently, I bet the number would be much closer to 10 per group. And some of those groups would disappear.
Be sure to read his full writeup for more interesting insights.
Online vs. Offline Social Networks « Fitzgerald Steele.
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