Tools To Visualize Your Facebook Network
In pharmaceutical marketing they’re known as “Key Opinion Leaders.” In medical device sales they’re “super surgeons.” And In social media networks, they’re the people with they greatest number of friends.
Uncovering these individuals is the easy party. Finding out how and why they interact is the real challenge. Facebook and third party tools provide an easy way to explore the new concepts at play in social media analysis today.
The Top 5 Visualization Tools for Facebook
To get you started with social media visualization we created a short list of tools based on simple criteria: they had to run on both PC’s and Macs and they had to be free of charge. While some are more robust than others, all will require you to log-in to Facebook and authenticate the application so that it can pull your data. In countdown fashion, here are our top five picks.
5 - Facebook Mutual Friend Network Visualization – allows you to map which friends in your network know each other. Note: if you have a large group of friends this prototype can take a LONG time to load. But it’s a wonderful proof of concept. Written by Daniel Claren, a Flash / Flex developer.
4 - Facebook Friend Wheel – see your network of friends represented in a wheel format. Forming the circumference of the wheel are “your friends” with spokes created by “friends who know each other.” This app has a lot of potential, but does require a bit of tweaking by the user to create meaningful visualizations.
3 - Facebook Visualiser – a tool to graphically explore your social network filtering on criteria including gender and relationship status [just pretend your a matchmaker and you'll get the idea]. The real promise of a tool like this will be advanced filtering including membership in groups and networks.
2 - Nexus - An extraordinary tool built on Graphviz twopi and neato. It calculates friend similarity by parsing profiles (through the Facebook API), and highlights links between friends who share interests and groups. While the generated image is static, browsing the connections is dynamic: clicking a friend node shows who they are friends with, as well as all commonalities with mutual friends.
1 - TouchGraph Facebook Friend Browser – lets you see how your friends are connected, and who has the most photos together. A polished application that works quite well it also ranked as our #1 choice because of its extensibility. TouchGraph has a suite of products for visualizing data in spreadsheets, on Amazon and in the Google-Sphere.
Next Steps
- Try a few of these tools and become familiar with the concept of visually exploring social networks
- If you work in marketing or public relations, consider how you would map key opinion leaders and buzz generators. It’s ok to use paper and pencil to get started.
- Leave a comment! Tell us about a favorite tool or technique you’ve found useful.
[inspiration via the Visual Complexity blog]
Daniel McLaren
Hi,
Thanks for including my Facebook visualization in your top five! I’ve also built a graphviz application for exploring you and your Facebook friends’ favourites. Check it out!
http://asterisq.com/blog/2008/12/02/facebook-graphviz-application
Mark Hollander
Hey Daniel
Really enjoyed the graphviz app for exploring favorites, especially because of my cinema habit. Where are you pulling the movie data from? My graph comes up with zero, but I believe I’ve reviewed about a couple dozen films so far…?
Anyway, great work. Just became a fan of it on FB.
Daniel McLaren
Thanks Mark. The data actually comes from your Facebook info tab. There’s a section there where you can list your favorite movies, books, etc. The visualization reads it as a comma-separated list and matches them against your friends’ items.
If you update your info tab with a comma-separated list of movies you’ll be able to visualize your favorites, too.
Mark Hollander
Ah, that makes sense. I’ve just got to find a way to parse the data out of Flickster (542) or Netflix (2000+) and into the info tab.
You’re really onto something here with Constellation Class. It opens up a lot of opportunities for Social Media and Key Opinion Leaders beyond just Facebook IMHO.
Redliner
Hi, if you like visualizations try this new application I have just completed. The app is on this url:
http://facebook.sociomap.com/ and the result looks like this:
http://www.my.sociomap.com/HKMn9goNKRUOdlsRPl0iHl/
Let me know how you like it ;)
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