Continuing on my “Ben Discoe rocks” campaign, i was utterly ecstatic to receive an image of my own first degree Friendster network. When Ben visualized his own data, he was dealing with a relatively small network. My data is a little bit more out of hand as i have 150+ friends and many of them are in overlapping social circles. Thus, in order to make it remotely legible, Ben needed to remove me from the picture and concentrate on my friends’ relationships with each other.

Of course, there is nothing better than having a visualization of your own network behavior because you can tell the story about the relationships better than anyone. For example, there are three dominant clusters. The top one is a group of friends in San Francisco who are tightly knit. The lower chunk is a group of spiritual and religious friends in SF. The group to the left is Brown. Of course, there are interconnections between these groups and there are people who branch off from there. From the outer right and into the lower half (below the clusters) are a slew of various researchers that i know from social software and digital academia.

Of course, this story is probably just as meaningless to you (if you don’t know me) as it was before i told you. But for me, as the actor, these patterns are immensely meaningful and important. Not only do they remind me of why networks are beautiful but they reaffirm my feelings that there are some impressive clusters amidst this data that needs to be given credence.

Sadly, two degrees of my friends are just completely illegible using this software. Time to build my own view.

[from my connected selves blog]

OMG. Ben Discoe visualized Friendster from his perspective. Tell me that’s not gorgeous! ::bounce::

Of course, as he properly points out, it is only a static image from his perspective without all of the proper interconnections. And the clusters are a bit confusing because not all of those people are evenly interconnected. That’s why the visualization of an n-degree system is such a pain in the toosh.

[I should note that the first question after my SIGGRAPH talk was “Would it be possible to visualize Friendster?”]

OK.. i so want one of my own. And i so badly want to analyze this data. Wah!!

I received three reports today of Friendster being banned in the workplace. Of those, only one person told me which companies (Wiley and Salmon Smith Barney). In the latter case, the writer notes “in the case of ssb, it’s just a sad
story of an evil employer that makes its employees work crazy hours and then doesn’t allow them to try to make external friends. this sort of asymmetric work/life fusion shouldn’t be tolerated.”

This raises an interesting question… In theory, dating is not really permissable at work, right? You’re there to be productive and productive only. With the tech boom, life revolved around work. Thus, those lines started to really blend. Ironically, there has been a significant backlash against those blended lines, yet the number of hours at work has not declined (in the States).

On one hand, i definitely realize that Friendster is more of a distraction than Solitaire (and that’s often banned). On the other, it’s painful to watch us turn into a corporate society where life is solely about work.

OK.. earlier i posted that one of the most powerful things about these services is that they provide an additional context in which to recognize people, right? People that you recognize from the bar suddenly become accessible when you see them on Friendster. Well, i have a new phenomenon going on in my participation on these services. It seems as though people think that it’s totally appropriate to add one as a Friend when they recognize them from another YASNS. I find this very peculiar, although it does validate my feeling that these services provide an additional meaningful context.

Everything is Political is Paul Krugman’s latest op-ed. In it, he argues that major departments of our government continue to become more and more corrupt and controlled by those in power. ::sigh:: So much for balance of power.

I have to admit that i’m both outraged and exhausted with being outraged. Of course, this is even more frustrating because i know that’s how those in power maintain power.

Speaking of which, oh boy am i dreading the California recall election. Half of the punk San Franciscan culture kids are running, viewing the whole thing as a joke. Of course, this only strengthens the Republican side so i end up wanting to *strangle* these folks because the last thing that i want to see in California is a Republican governor. Dear me oh my.

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