Friend networks graphing

[towerless]

I've been recently thinking about various graphical ways to represent online communities, those in LJ in particular. There is a bunch of tools that build one sort of graph or another, but none seem to provide a good view of a community the user in question is a part of. While investigating this problem I've built a prototype tool that tries to

Comments

[darxus]

http://www.chaosreigns.com/code/ljfriends2dot/

Some output (.png's) in http://www.chaosreigns.com/code/ljfriends2dot/examples/

That script generates a .dot file (as used by graphviz). The .png's I generated were done with http://www.chaosreigns.com/code/springgraph/ which works similar to neato (graphviz) but was intended to show relationships better.

[towerless]

this is neat (pun intended :)). one of the problems I had to fight is the size of the image - the larger it is the less readable/browseable it will be. this approach seems to generate larger images than neato, I wonder if there are techniques (in general) for building very compact graphs still giving a good representation of the community structure...

[cemcom]

I've recently (this summer @ internship) been playing with hybrid networks (not just users, but say, documents they create or link to or w/e, thrown into the network), as well as using textual data generated by the users to enhance the meaning behind the network (e.g. finding clusters of people who talk about similar things).

Using a single connection type and a single node type can lead to interesting pictures, but often the meaning or interpretation of the data can be fairly lacking. Hybrid networks can lead to a much richer understanding of what's really happening in the social space.

Welcome to the party!

[mcfnord]

http://ljmindmap.com/h.aspx?n=towerless

Re: Welcome to the party!

[woofiegrrl]

That's very cool. How does it work? Can it be made to show the friend group clusters, like towerless's first picture? I'd really love to see if that worked the way I think it would for me, but I don't know how to run what he did.

[mcfnord]

i use color
http://ljmindmap.com/h.aspx?n=woofiegrrl

sometimes it works better than others

[woofiegrrl]

Oh! I could swear mine didn't have color before. But I can definitely see the grouping with it. (Although my dad seems to have ended up in the same group as my queer friends, which is odd!) Thanks for that!

[smokedamage]

very pretty.

out of my league. good luck and have fun with it!

[mantycore]

Did you see TouchGraph LJ browser? I currently rewrite TGLJ functionaliy over base TG, as its functionality is rather limited, and pleased to see what I am not alone on this track.