{"id":1546,"date":"2009-06-02T23:19:26","date_gmt":"2009-06-03T06:19:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/?p=1546"},"modified":"2009-06-02T23:20:52","modified_gmt":"2009-06-03T06:20:52","slug":"friend-graphs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/friend-graphs\/","title":{"rendered":"Friend Graphs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For a long time I&#8217;ve had the colorful Facebook Friend Wheel on my Facebook profile, but I was always a little unimpressed with its grouping mechanism: Although it was generally pretty good, it always put a few friends in totally the wrong place, it seemed. Recently, I became interested in finding a better way to vizualize the mutual-friend relationships among my many facebook compatriots.<\/p>\n<p>The two best applications that I&#8217;ve found so far are <a href=\"http:\/\/apps.facebook.com\/touchgraph\/\">Touchgraph Photos<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/apps.facebook.com\/_nexus_\/\">Nexus<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I like Touchgraph Photos because it renders the graph in real time (it is in Java, so the performance is fine up to about 100 friends, but when I go to all of my 400 connections, it slows to a crawl). Touchgraph Photos also lets you customize which networks and friends are shown, and, as the name implies, can show photos of each friend as well. Since I&#8217;m much more interested in the connections, I disable the photos and end up with a graph like this:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/media\/images\/2009\/06\/touchgraph.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-1547\" title=\"Touchgraph\" src=\"\/media\/images\/2009\/06\/touchgraph-550x486.png\" alt=\"Touchgraph\" width=\"550\" height=\"486\" srcset=\"\/media\/images\/2009\/06\/touchgraph-550x486.png 550w, \/media\/images\/2009\/06\/touchgraph.png 874w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Each node can be dragged around, but with this many nodes it is slow and not very effective at moving groups around. I also noticed that some mutual friend connections are missing, which is the most perplexing part of this application. Nevertheless, it is pretty cool: IS kids are on the left in red, CSE kids are on the right in yellow-green, and BioE kids are in the upper right in purple.<\/p>\n<p>Next, I tried out Nexus, which takes a similar approach but without real-time rendering, and names are only shown when highlighting a node (all connected names also show up as well). The rendering engine looks cooler, too, but the result doesn&#8217;t have as much information in it:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/media\/images\/2009\/06\/friendsdarksimple382.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-1550\" title=\"Friends_Dark_Simple\" src=\"\/media\/images\/2009\/06\/friendsdarksimple382-550x460.png\" alt=\"Friends_Dark_Simple\" width=\"550\" height=\"460\" srcset=\"\/media\/images\/2009\/06\/friendsdarksimple382-550x460.png 550w, \/media\/images\/2009\/06\/friendsdarksimple382-1024x856.png 1024w, \/media\/images\/2009\/06\/friendsdarksimple382.png 1083w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>You can see the same three groups in this rendering: IS kids are the top cluster, BioE kids are the bottom-right, and CSE kids are the bottom-left.<\/p>\n<p>Good times!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For a long time I&#8217;ve had the colorful Facebook Friend Wheel on my Facebook profile, but I was always a little unimpressed with its grouping mechanism: Although it was generally pretty good, it always put a few friends in totally the wrong place, it seemed. Recently, I became interested in finding a better way to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-1546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-everything","tag-people"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1546"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1565,"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1546\/revisions\/1565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}