Two days on facebook - 128 connections

After only two days on facebook, I've made 128 connections. Mind you, I don't call them all friends, I've essentially contacted everyone I found and recognized, and it sorted added up. I still probably have a ton of contacts which are not approved. Also, considering social network theory such as Dunbar numbers, I'm not a fool, it's not feasible to search through all friend's lists just to recognize someone new. Except for people I've thought of, this has essentially grown by itself and anyone who recognize me should feel free to add me.


I am really curious about how facebook optimizes the network finding, if it makes clusters of people etc, but generally I think it should speed up all that connection making by for example providing clusters of some dozen people, asking you "do you recognize five or more of these people?" and then be accepted into clusters by some voting as well. One thing I fell for righ away is the application "Friend Wheel" which you see an example of above. It analyzes the connections between your friends and attempts to cluster them around the perimeter of a circle. As you can see, I have five clearly distinguishable clusters (or meta-clusters, since some are bigger than what would make sense for the computational model) and some random people. I went ahead and made an animation of the development of my friend wheel during my first two days at facebook, just watch the beauty grow! For obvious integrity reasons I've scaled it down to unreadable, but email me if you want the fancy version:


PS. Much of the time, facebook feels kind of like a noisy room of all the people you have ever known... it's quite exhausting!

PPS. I love it how more than a hundred people with connection to my home village Gnosjö have joined that group and are discussing online, this may be the first time since the dawn of telivision Gnosjö-people are actually communicating with each other!

PPPS. I spend more time than is justifiable on this... I consider it studying, mind you! :-)