Large-Scale Online Social Network Visualization (Image 2)

A visualization of a personal network on Friendster, a leading global online social network, to 3 hops out. In this image, edges have been removed, allowing one to see the distribution of the individual nodes--a social galaxy. This personal Friendster network, which belongs to Jeffrey Heer of the University of California, Berkeley, consists of Heer, his friends, his friends' friends, and his friends' friends' friends. The resulting networks consist of 47,471 people connected by 432,430 friendship relations. The data was collected from October 2003 to February 2004, as part of the Vizster (Visualizing Online Social Networks) project. The images were created using the Prefuse visualization toolkit.

The nodes are colored by proximity to the center of the network (which in this case is Jeffrey Heer). The central person is the brightest, their friends are the next brightest and so on. The elements are also ordered so that friends and relations closer from the central person are drawn on top of more distant relations and people. The graph layout was computed using a standard, force-directed layout method in which nodes exert anti-gravity against each other and the edges are treated as springs. (Date of Image: 2004) [See related image Here.]