bad idea

[egypturnash]

You might remember me playing around with friends graphs a few weeks ago.

Today, I decided to try and expand a little. I wanted to see my friends, and their friends, all related to each other. I grabbed the .dot file describing my own friends graph, then used that as reference to get the .dot files for people who I am involved in some sort of LJ friends relationship with - one-sided or covalent, I didn't care, I was just going down the list. After a few, I cut-and-pasted them end-to-end and ran it through the graph generator program.


It took a while.

I looked at the results. And decided that this was a spectacularly bad idea..

See the vague yellow splodge somewhere near the center, buried under lines? That's me. See that huge encrustation of black in the upper-left part of the thing? postvixen is somewhere under there.

And this is just my friend relationships plus those of crackjackal, eselgeist, perlandria, postvixen, protocat, radd, roon, and ursulav. I shudder to imagine what the graph of myself and all eighty-something people I see under ' friends' and 'friend of' would look like. And how long it would take to generate such a thing.

---

So what have we learnt here?

Social relationship networks are a lot denser than one thinks, even for a prickly antisocial bitch like me.

postvixen is a total lj-friends slut. (No offense meant. I am in awe of your lava-filled gregariousness. How you keep up with your friends page I have no idea.)

The 'six degrees of separation' thing becomes much more convincing when you look at how many people show up in a full view of a mere two degrees (I know X, who knows Y. The previous graph was only concerned with people who I know, and their relationships; even if every single person except me knew Z, Z would not have shown up, because it was all about me me me me me).

I feel like a total geek for using 'covalent' to describe a mutual-ljfriends relationship.

My vague idea of writing a little script to grab, clean up, merge, and prettify the friends graph of a person and her friends(of) list is a silly one, that would result in incomprehensibly huge graphs. Because almost everyone is two hops away from a postvixen or a spacehyena or a sythyry - people watching and/or watched by around two hundred people. And some people are two hops away from brad.

Comments

[wolphyn.livejournal.com]

That is truly frightening. Almost as frightening as the current value of the human population of Earth.

[barberio.livejournal.com]

There is a whole branch of graph theory about this property of assosiative links. It explains the transmision of memes in culture, but it also explains some other things more abstracted from what we view as networks. It can explain how crickets synchronise their churips, and why if you have a room full of pendulum clocks they will eventualy all start swinging in synchronisity.

[nerfcoyote.livejournal.com]

i remember last year (http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=nerfcoyote&itemid=25373) finding a tool (http://www.petekrawczyk.com/lj_connect/) for finding the shortest distance between you and another user via mutual friends. If you haven't seen this thing already, it's pretty cool.

I pondered trying to compile a list of everyone up to six degrees away from me. i got to about the second degree and gave up.

the random search function is disabled, so I put in a region search for Sunnyvale, CA, and tried a few nearby users, with varying results. And I'm three hops from brad.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I have a reference link to it on my LJ bio page. I, too, am three hops away from Brad. Four if you require it to be through mutual friends only. I suspect that everyone on LJ is three hops away from Brad.

I think following the friendship links out that far would include everyone who lists even a single friend.

[riose.livejournal.com]

*boggles at the vast friend-scape*

Sometimes having too many friends means having no friends at all.
One of the curses of being a celebrity.

[markpasc.livejournal.com]

Vaguely resembles what charles got when he tried a friends graph thingy (http://www.pastiche.org/~cmiller/ljbrowse/). Looks like you and your friends have more friends, though...

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Damn sociable furries!

[mcfnord.livejournal.com]

furries! they are totally invading me

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

See that huge encrustation of black in the upper-left part of the thing? postvixen is somewhere under there.

"Kincaid... She's just this lamp, you know?"

[perlandria.livejournal.com]

Wow , you beat out Bellacrow for sheer density!

Do you have any idea how impressive that is? For one thing, she is persian!

[eselgeist.livejournal.com]

oh but it's so pretty to look at *nodnodnodnods* thanks!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

*grin* Much more comprehensible: follow the 'a few weeks ago' link, then go to the 'take a look' link there. That'll show you me, all my friends/friends-of, and the links between them.

You might have to install a browser plugin first (which I helpfully link to in the journal entry), but it's worth it, really - you can zoom in, and it's lots tinier than a gif.

[nigel.livejournal.com]

Hmn... That chart looks like ThinkGeek.com's "Map of the internet", but without all the pretty colors.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Adding pretty colors was going to be one of my goals if I wrote something to recursively grab all the .dot files for a given user and her friends(of). Color people by how close they are to the central user, different colored lines for one-way and two-way... there's a lot you could do. But I'd have to do actual coding to make that happen, and I really don't do that any more.

[puppehkat.livejournal.com]

You.. have way too much time on yer hands. It's funny though.. when we realize how small the world is.

And then I marvel at how the whole world is simply astunded by the fact that any small thing we do.. impacts everyone. You have but to look at a chart like that to see how that could so easily be.

Today a butterfly, tomorrow a tidal wave.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I didn't draw all that! It was just a matter of viewing a little page source and not being afraid to get my hands dirty with some command-line tools, then playing with the plain-text input files.

Re:

[puppehkat.livejournal.com]

uh huh. You still have way too much time on yer hands.

[silvermink.livejournal.com]

Personally, I think it looks kind of like a snow angel.

[mutleyjames.livejournal.com]

Must...not...twitch...click...Friends...button...
Want...Need...Cloud of Flies...like...Friends...

[mcfnord.livejournal.com]

the image does not give me a boner, but looks a little like a dandelion in seed. the black looks all scratchy, like depression. looks like string art. make it pulsate like a real brain. or swirl the tendrils like an octopus.