Get your Facebook network visualized (properly and without anyone stealing your data)

Many of you who read this have had a blob like this created to "visualize" your network of facebook friends:


In my opinion, hideous and useless. When you could have something scalable, informative and beautiful like this:


I'd like to briefly tell you how to get your own graph like that. Because it is so much more flexible it has not been packaged as easily accessible as myFnetwork, but connect with me and I can guide you or show you how it's done through screen sharing.

1. Download the data necessary, through the netvizz app
2. Install the Gephi application (available for most platforms) to crunch and style the data
3. Export to PDF to explore and enjoy, or even print your own nerdy large-format poster. Done!
   

The details of how to use Gephi are in this tutorial (or this, the tutorial is more convoluted but it's a generally more interesting site).

From my friends network you can intuitively see a number of interesting things, it's a sort of picture of my social life. If tweaked and run according to different parameters (interests, gender, other groups) the sky is the limit for what you can discover using such statistical tools. They can tell things about your group, or people you want to learn about - I keep some of my experiments in this gallery.

Now, I can't tell for sure why apps like myFnetwork only give you such a hideous result, but I have been told that the prime motivation for providing any small facebook apps like that is to access and resell your information. Facebook in themselves are marginally better keepers of it, and in principle netvizz (the app I use to download the data) may be as bad too, but at least they don't give me bullshit trinkets which are supposed to keep me happy and attract attention from my connections.

LinkedIn also created a similar visualization they call inmaps - much nicer though and they don't run it off Gephi but borrowed everything from it's style. My professional graph you can see here. My idol Joi Ito has a great video having it demonstrated to him personally here:



What are you waiting for? Be the big brother and process the information you have access to, I for sure intend to further experiment with these things, so stay posted!

Daemon by Zeraus - complimentary books and friendly marketing

 

I got a package today! The stamp collection on the envelope was truly impressive, death and misery to Posten, and many thanks and lunch or a couple of beers to my friend Henrik of Internet Video Advisory Group who sent me the book!

The deal was that Henrik had received some complimentary copies of Leinad Zeraus' "Daemon" (do read his story, it's an interesting one about friendly marketing). Since I had already several months ago put the book on my wishlist after reading a very positive review by my idol Joi Ito, I pretty much begged Henrik to send one of his copies to me.

Frankly, I don't know too much about the book yet, but if Joi considers it inspiring, it's usually something cool, considering his extraordinary understanding of social media.

In other news, my girlfriend recently returned from her too long trip to the US (yes, I was lonely), and in her handluggage was a bunch of books for me, and a Canon Speedlite 430EX flash, I'm so excited about that one, finally flash pictures which don't look like crap! The books she got me are:

• "The light of other days" by Arthur C. Clarke
  
• "Light - Science & Magic" as suggested by Erik Starck
  
• "Made to stick" by Chip Heath and Dan Heath as suggested also by Erik and Jonas Hombert

Skyhook - I know where I am

I just went ahead and submitted my home AP to the Skyhook location database. Alt/Option (⌥)-click the Airport icon to see the MAC address. That's the hardware address of your wireless access point, not the address of your Mac :-)

The coverage, especially in Estonia, is very spotty, but this should enable me to use Loki for where I usually am located, so what the heck.

I found this out by the way from a person in the chat room connected to the livestream from the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium 2008. I found it's incredibly exciting how they have a symposium with extraordinary people like those speakers, and still allow "ordinary" people like myself participate and participate in the chatter of the virtual room connected to the event. Thanks to Joi Ito's twitter for alerting me of the whole thing.



(Update: This totally grabbed the attention of my entire evening, just because the symposium was overflowing with cool things. Anyway to my emberassment I realized that I had not initially realized that I was chatting away about our fascination with the revival of the neighbourhood with Liz Lawley, who seemed to be the one moderating the symposium (and had a very interesting talk as well)! Anyway, she suggested I'd take a look at the works of Keith N. Hampton (and of course, the rest of the channel shouted Putnam and Bourdieu as well), which I definitely will. Finally MoYuMe-Peter sent me a message that Joi will pe speaking at SIME nov 12th-13th and that there were free blogger press passes to apply for until tonight... Phew, what an evening, thanks everyone!)

(Update 2: Of course, Joi posted a set of his usual wonderful photos from the symposium. A lot of very cool people and ideas there)

(Update 3: Don't miss out on the ideary post keeping the info on the progress of this!)

Creative Commons Sunday!

As friends of me may have noticed, I'm a big fan of Joichi Ito since I met him in Tallinn and lately also his Creative Commons friend and collegue Lawrence Lessig. So here goes, a dense series of videos related to CC. Thanks to Hax here and here. Note that I know CC-licensing is not the abolishing of copyright, nor necessarily requiring share-alike to produce a special family of components like the GPL-fanatics like Richard Stallman argue for.

PS. Does anyone know rules regarding performance royalties and amateur recording of a live concert like I encouraged in one of my recent blog posts from the R.E.M. concert? I would like to think that the artist can at least explicitly allow recording and redistribution of a concert, but in Estonia, that seems to be mandatory to go through also the royalty collecting agency and the idea of a song may anyway be tied to the original song writor and composer. I have no idea...