( ._.)

An idea that has been brewing for some time...


http://apps.facebook.com/sociograph/

The 1.0 version was clunky, in Java, and relied on me racking my brain to figure out how everybody I knew was connected and entering the data manually. Day after day I would add to the dataset, until I finally realized that I was becoming obsessive and I had to stop, as the job was neverending. If we were even acquainted in 2002 you are probably in there...


http://forresto.com/oldsite/interactive/sociograph/sociograph.html

But now it is 2008 and we have fun things like APIs to play with. The only data that I can get to easily to connect people is groups, but I would like this to have more connections graphed. The connections are shallower than my hand-coded graph, but infinitely broader.

I need 5 people to add it in order to release it into the wild, so if you think it is at all neat please do. All suggestions welcome, of course.

My interest in data visualization can be mapped in this order:

1. Java Graph Layout demo -- a small applet
• I played with making cubes and snowflakes with the simple notation for adding nodes and edges
  
2. Touchgraph -- added navigation and metadata, xml datasets
• undertook a project to connect everybody that I knew by how they knew each other called Sociograph (had to stop adding nodes after a while, was getting obsessed)
  
3. Prefuse -- improved on these concepts aesthetically, and added many new visualizations
   
• almost inspired to learn Java, but never really dove into it
  
4. SpringGraph -- Graph layout concepts in Flex
   
• created TagGraph with this and the Flickr API, which creates an almost limitless web of photos and tags in an easily explorable interface
  
5. Flare -- some of prefuse ported to ActionScript
• could inspire some very cool data visualization apps in the near future
  
• may become the base of Sociograph 2.0
• http://flare.prefuse.org/demo/ -- so cool