Bernie Hogan’s Facebook Social Network Data Provider and Visualization toolkit

My colleague at the Oxford Internet Institute, Bernie Hogan, is working on tools that collect personal Facebook network data and visualize the connections among your friends.  These tools now interoperate with NodeXL through the GraphML XML file format. Here is the new link: http://namegen.oii.ox.ac.uk/fb/downloadNet.php?type=graphml

Here is an example: http://twitpic.com/9rvfq

2009 - September - Bernie Hogan - Facebook Network Visualization

It provides a good illustration of the ways a person’s social network is clumped into clusters built around life phases, workplaces, educational institutions, teams and locations.  As people move through more of these stages of life during the Facebook era (and often before) they accumulate these clusters.

Facebook or other contact and friend management systems might could leverage this clustering to organize the presentation of contact information streams.

Bernie recently announced on the SOCNET list that he has updated his script for downloading your Facebook network.

“Features:

1. Its faster. (Presently orders of magnitude faster than Nexus, Touchgraph or ORA).
2. It gives nice feedback during the download.
3. It has less bugs!
4. It gives you the output as a file you can right-click and save rather than copy-paste.
5. IDs are names.”

Bernie writes that phase two of his project is underway.

Bernie is planning a demo at the Sunbelt social network analysis conference in Italy in 2010.

Bernie is the author of the Facebook chapter in our forthcoming book Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world available from Morgan-Kaufmann in July 2010.