Co-op student maps the world according to Facebook
from Waterloo's Daily Bulletin
Computer science student Paul Butler hit the worldwide news this week. Paul is nearing the end of a co-op work term at Facebook, and "while his code was compiling", did a little playing with some data from the half-billion-member social network.
map of connections among facebook usersThe result: a map (left) that provides a visualization of global friendships — filaments connecting the home cities of pairs of Facebook "friends." Paul and his map have been featured in media from PC Magazine to the National Post.
Says one tech website: "Butler took a sampling of about ten million pairs of friends from Facebook's data warehouse Apache Hive and began by combining that data with each user's current city, summing the number of friends between each pair of cities. That data was then merged with the longitude and latitude of each city."
"As Paul explored the data in open-source statistics environment, he pared it down and down and moved it around and found something fabulous . . . a finely detailed map of the world made real not by the traditional coasts, rivers, and political borders, but by real human relationships."
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