A Social Galaxy

Every person is the sun of their social galaxy, and now they can see a representation of that galaxy thanks to a "large-scale social network visualization." Data collected as part of the Vizster Project were imaged to show a visualization of an online social network consisting of the researcher, his friends, his friends’ friends and his friends' friends' friends. The central person is the brightest, that person’s friends are the next brightest, and so on. The data is ordered so that friends and relations closer to the central person are drawn on top of more distant relations and people.  The resulting network consists of 47,471 people connected by 432,430 friendship relations. The images were created using the Prefuse Visualization Toolkit.

Credit: Jeffrey Heer, Computer Science Division, University of California at Berkeley