This image is a visualization of my personal friendster network (circa February, 2004) to 3 hops out. The network consists of 47471 people connected by 432430 edges.

This image shows the same network but with the edges removed, allowing one to see the distribution of the individual nodes... a social galaxy.

Description

The preceding images visualize my personal friendster network to 3 hops out, an online social network consisting of myself, my "friends", my friends' friends, and my friends' friends' friends. The resulting networks consist of 47471 people connected by 432430 friendship relations. The data was collected during the timespan of October 2003 to February 2004 as part of the Vizster project. The images were created using the prefuse visualization toolkit.

Nodes are colored by proximity to the center of the network (which in this case is me). The central person is the brightest, that person's friends next brightest and so on. The elements are also ordered so that friends and relations closer from the central person are drawn on top of more distant relations and people. The graph layout was computed using a standard force-directed layout method in which nodes exert anti-gravity against each other and the edges are treated as springs.