Where Facebook Is Not Popular Yet?
Visualizing Friendships
… When the data is the social graph of 500 million people, there are a lot of lenses through which you can view it.
One that piqued my curiosity was the locality of friendship. I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. I wanted a visualization that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them …
Facebook is one of the largest websites in the world, with more than 500 million monthly users. The site was started in 2004 by founder and CEO <!—->Mark Zuckerberg when he was an undergraduate student at Harvard.
Since September 2006, anyone over the age of 13 with a valid e-mail address can join Facebook. Users can add “friends” and send them messages, post announcements, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves.
The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US. The intention of the book is to help students to get to know each other better.
Facebook is huge in North America, Europe, India, and Indonesia, but is almost unused in big swaths of Asia and North Africa.
Artist Ian Wojtowicz put together this graphic based on Facebook’s <!—->map of connections combined with NASA’s pictures of the earth at night. He then took the places where Facebook was inactive, pinpointed them to specific cities on the <!–NASA–>NASA map, and highlighted them in yellow.
The map was highlighted by Flowing Data earlier today.
Here’s the whole world.
Dark areas are where Facebook is most prominent, where yellow cities are places where few people use Facebook:
Sources of Information:
Image: Ian Wojtowicz
http://station.woj.com/2011/07/unfacebook-world.html
The original Facebook blog post explaining the visualization in more detail and here’s a link to a high res version of the image.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook
