733 Friends - I Rez, Therefore I Am

It’s been a long time since I updated you on my Facebook Friend Status. No, not “Status Update,” the status of my friend list!! 🙂

I’ve got, give or take the strange pulsar-like qualities of peeps on Facebook these days, about 733 friends. AND, my beloved TouchGraph is running great again!

The very top image is a close up of the “Friend Threads” emanating out from my Touchgraph. BTW, as it shows, I’m “Vanessa” on Facebook because when I signed up FB said “Vaneeesa” had “too many repeating letters and that it was an unacceptable name. Thanks Mark!

The above image is a graphic of all my friends as visualized by the TouchGraph engine. You see a few “Green Circle Networks” – interestingly TG doesn’t seem to support the Place Networks anymore, just the Company & Edu ones. Anyway, even though “Second Life” isn’t a “Network” on Facebook – because it’s against the FB TOS to be an SL Resident on FB (hence many peeps moves to Avatars United, Plurk, et al…

Anyway, even though SL isn’t an FB “Network,” TG clearly reveals that it IS! In fact as the rather dramatic image above shows, my SL Network is so big (number of peeps and density of interconnections) that the, uh, SL “bolus” has become “me” and pushed all other connections out much like a star gone nova creating an annular nebula! 😛

A more abstract TG connection matrix for the SL bolus above, and a zoom in with images below:

Above, zooming even deeper into the SL bolus and looking at the connections of one friend, Alex Demme, within the connections of my friends. Below, stepping back in time by about 200 friends to an earlier state of the SL bolus, before it had caused the creation of the annular nebula in my friend matrix.

In this TouchGraph from when I had a little over 500 friends we already see the dramatic SL bolus, but it didn’t yet have quite enough density for gravitational collapse and the subsequent supernova thrusting of all other non-SL friends out to the annular nebula. If you scroll thru the history of my Blog Posts on Friends:

http://vaneeesa.com/category/culture-ideas/social-networks/

you can see an even earlier time when the distribution of all friends was a more homogenous, evenly distributed network.

Also my TouchGraph back at this time still included place networks and you see a number of them. Below are details of my 500+ friend TouchGraph with hilited connections for a few place networks: The Netherlands, Chile, Italy.

Below, again back from the 500+ friend TouchGraph, is another sub-friend network, or friend network within your friend network, for my friend Sanaa Ounil from Casablanca:

You see Sanaa’s connections to our mutual friends, just to her left you see her younger sister Ahlam, listed on the TouchGraph as “Ahlam O.”

Much has been said about the FB TOS not allowing “Fakesters” and their practice of closing accounts of Avatars “when they find them”… or from most views, “on random occasion”. I’ve always seen fluctuations in my friend count and I’ve heard stories of avatars losing 100 FB Friends overnight. I’m also aware of certain FB friends who weren’t SL Avatars having their accounts disappear, generally peeps who seemed to have “fictitious identities” and a possibly spammy sort of presence.

In the sad case of my pal Sanaa, I’m not sure what happened. Some days Facebook shows her as existing. Some days Facebook says no such person. Like a twinkling pulsar. Strange. Recent messages haven’t gone thru. Today Facebook says Saana doesn’t exist… and interestingly, today FB says there’s no Ahlam account on FB, but FB search did show me Ahlam’s page on another social network called “WAYN”

As you see above, I’ve now joined my ONE MILLIONTH social network! And I’ve messaged Ahlam about herself and Sanaa. I suppose the Facebook perspective is that we shouldn’t worry about who they have “conveniently disappear” in the night… because FB is always ready to throw you dozens of NEW Friends!

So many FB’ers want to be friends! 🙂 I forget if these are fake-real or real-fake friends… but it sure is great to have them! So many peeps in Second Life hate me, it’s great to know everybody on Facebook loves me! Well, except for Mark, of course.

Anyway, I have long been gaga about Social Network Visualization tools and TouchGraph is the best I know of. Of course it’s actually a “Network Visualization” or “Data Visualization” tool… but I’m calling it a “Social Network Visualization” tool because when the icons a tool maps are corporate logos… that’s not nearly as exciting as seeing your “real” friends in the complexity, wonder, and beauty of their social interconnections.

Having said that… I’ll leave you with a plain old array of a “GridView” of my 733 Facebook friends. Oh, and to YOU out there… thanks for being my friend! 🙂