Featured Maps: Facebook: Visualizing Friendships (11 January 2011)

Last month, Paul Butler, then an intern at Facebook, posted an article about his work on Visualizing Friendships using a sample of Facebook friendship pairings. The result was a remarkably detailed map of the world, even without any explicit geographical input.

Noticing that the map appeared to use a Plate Carrée or Rectangular projection, adding the map to the Great Circle Mapper seemed like an obvious way to allow further exploration. Today's featured map shows the world of Facebook connections centered on Palo Alto, home of Facebook's offices, but remote areas such as islands can be especially interesting to examine.