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Entertainment

Visualizing 10 Million Facebook Friendships

Oh what an intricate, tangled social web we weave.

This is what 10 million global pairs of Facebook friends looks like. And who made this stunning data visualization? A specially commissioned artist? A Facebook employee? Nearly. It was a Facebook intern by the name of Paul Butler. What ever happened to making coffe runs and photocopies? Not good enough for this guy, it seems. Instead, he wanted to see how political and geographical borders affected the distribution of a sample of Facebook users chosen at random—and by the looks of things, the effect seems to be minimal. You can see a higher concentration of users in North America and Europe, but that’s to be expected.

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Here’s what he said about it in a Facebook blog post:

I began by taking a sample of about ten million pairs of friends from Apache 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.

Well, if Paul makes coffee as good as he data visualizes, we’re thinking he’s a keeper. Check the map below to see the fruits his labor, but to do it justice and see it in all its glory, check out the high-res version here.