Social Graphs in Gephi, Bringing your personal data closer to home
Ever wondered which friends or connections of yours introduced you to or are connected to the majority of your friends? What about finding out how big your cluster of friends from old school are vs how many co-workers you are networked with. Well now you can, you can look at your data like a scientist; and easily too.
We recommend checking out Social Graphs in Gephi which is a great visualization app that you can have interpret your data. Last night I was introduced to Gephi as my friend and I downloaded our Facebook data and organized it into clusters and communities to find where key influencers were within our network and understand our networks in new ways.
It was very eye opening and interesting. I found that my friend had very distinct clusters of Undergrad / Grad connections, college, and locals to his home along with a major following from some of his favorite events. This surprised him as he did not realize how many more connections and friends he had made from some of the local events versus how many people he was connected to from college and other associates. For me I found out how random and dispersed my network had become. Generally, especially in an area such as San Francisco on networks like Facebook and Linked In you are only 3-4 connections away from reaching almost anybody, also called degrees of separation. For me, I have connected with so many different people while building out the Global Good Network that there are many instances where people cannot be placed into big communities. Therefore I found that I had three or four big communal areas accounting for about 50% of my network with the rest of them being outliers without connections.
There are many ways to slice and dice your data and you can label and colorize it so that you can see male vs female or age relationships to understand the spread of your data. Anyways check it out world, this is some cool technology bringing your data closer to you in new ways.
They say in Silicon Valley the new rock stars are Data Scientists, no longer Software Engineers!
In order to pull your data from Facebook you must visit: http://snacourse.com/getnet/index.php?action=huge&sex=on&wallcount=on and then authorize it to access your Facebook data.
Read more about Gephi directly on the website: http://gephi.org/
