Facebook: Visualisierung der Mitgliederverbindungen

Attraktive Visualisierung der Facebook-Verbindungen.

Visualisierung der Facebook-Verbindungen

Neben China und Russland scheinen auch die Japaner in einer eigenen Welt zu leben. Ihr Mobile-Markt folgt jedenfalls andern Regeln.

Beschrieb des Vorgehens des Facebook-Mitarbeiters Paul Butler:

«I began exploring it in R, an open-source statistics environment. As a sanity check, I plotted points at some of the latitude and longitude coordinates. To my relief, what I saw was roughly an outline of the world. Next I erased the dots and plotted lines between the points. After a few minutes of rendering, a big white blob appeared in the center of the map. Some of the outer edges of the blob vaguely resembled the continents, but it was clear that I had too much data to get interesting results just by drawing lines. I thought that making the lines semi-transparent would do the trick, but I quickly realized that my graphing environment couldn’t handle enough shades of color for it to work the way I wanted.

Instead I found a way to simulate the effect I wanted. I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line’s color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.»

Oder mit andern Worten: Glaube keiner Statistik, die Du nicht selber gefälscht hast…