The site built in HMTL5 by W+K is impressive in itself too.

Visualizing data is like photography. Instead of starting with a blank canvas, you manipulate the lens used to present the data from a certain angle.

When the data is the social graph of 500 million people, there are a lot of lenses through which you can view it. One that piqued my curiosity was the locality of friendship. I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. I wanted a visualization that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them.

I began by taking a sample of about ten million pairs of friends fromApache Hive, our data warehouse. I combined that data with each user’s current city and summed the number of friends between each pair of cities. Then I merged the data with the longitude and latitude of each city.

At that point, I began exploring it in R, an open-source statistics environment. As a sanity check, I plotted points at some of the latitude and longitude coordinates. To my relief, what I saw was roughly an outline of the world. Next I erased the dots and plotted lines between the points. After a few minutes of rendering, a big white blob appeared in the center of the map. Some of the outer edges of the blob vaguely resembled the continents, but it was clear that I had too much data to get interesting results just by drawing lines. I thought that making the lines semi-transparent would do the trick, but I quickly realized that my graphing environment couldn’t handle enough shades of color for it to work the way I wanted.

Instead I found a way to simulate the effect I wanted. I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line’s color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.

After a few minutes of rendering, the new plot appeared, and I was a bit taken aback by what I saw. The blob had turned into a surprisingly detailed map of the world. Not only were continents visible, certain international borders were apparent as well. What really struck me, though, was knowing that the lines didn’t represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships. Each line might represent a friendship made while travelling, a family member abroad, or an old college friend pulled away by the various forces of life.

Later I replaced the lines with great circle arcs, which are the shortest routes between two points on the Earth. Because the Earth is a sphere, these are often not straight lines on the projection.

When I shared the image with others within Facebook, it resonated with many people. It’s not just a pretty picture, it’s a reaffirmation of the impact we have in connecting people, even across oceans and borders.

(Source)

Advertising Agency: H-57 Creative Station, Milan, Italy
Creative Director: Matteo Civaschi, Gianmarco Milesi
Account Director: Sabrina Di Gregorio
Typographer: Matteo Civaschi

(via kissmyblackads)

Facebook has penciled in a major press event in San Francisco next Monday, with invitations giving strong hints that it has something to do with email or messaging.

Should Facebook move into the webmail arena it won’t be a big surprise, after all Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have to varying degrees integrated social notworking features into their webmail systems, with Google’s now infamous Buzz creating havoc for the firm. Last week Google settled a class action lawsuit that alleged the firm automatically enrolled users into Google Buzz and exposed users’ Gmail contact lists without their consent.

More recently Google and Facebook have been at fisticuffs over the export of Gmail contact data to Facebook. It led to heated exchanges between the two firms boiling down to the fact that both feel that the other isn’t reciprocating the ability to share contact data. Now, with rumours circulating of Facebook looking to compete with Gmail, one can see why both firms have employed protectionist policies to safeguard profitable data.

The majority of Facebook users who don’t care one bit about their privacy are unlikely to give a passing thought about the ramifications of giving the firm access to their emails. That might mean that the firm could get away with doing what it likes, for the umpteenth time. For Facebook, being able to analyse its user’s emails will provide it with another means of capturing very profitable private user data.
That’s not to say Google is a saint when it comes to acquiring and using user data, however given Facebook’s recent track record, it seems to be a better choice out of a bad bunch.

Monday is looking likely to be the day when Facebook reveals yet another way in which it can someday ‘mistakenly’ abuse user data.

How do you promote an “experience” via social media? You make the experience social. And in this case, E-dologic took it one step further by introducing “The Like Machine,” a new approach to connecting the real-world experience to the online community and the world’s first real-life RFID event tied to Facebook.

Here’s how it worked. RFID devices were installed at facilities throughout the Village, and each guest received an ID bracelet that transmitted an RFID signal. The guests were then able to use the bracelet to “Like” each of the Coca Cola Village facilities. For example, a guest could place her bracelet next to the RFID device at the pool, and this would automatically post a Facebook message on her wall stating that she “Liked” the pool at the Village. There was also a photographer circulating throughout the Village with an RFID device; guests who were photographed could “touch” the photographer to automatically upload a pre-tagged picture to the Coca-Cola Village Facebook Page.

The result was more than 54,000 “Likes” for the Coca-Cola Village Facebook Page, making it the most “Liked” fan page in Israel, and millions of social media interactions.