I’m sure you use Facebook and therefore you know, more or less, who you are friends with or who your friends are friend with but do you have any idea how your friends are inter-related? Who of your friends are friends with which other and who, for example, has the most photos in common?
If you are interested in visualizing how social networks, or, for that matter, any collection of things with relationships, are structured, you need to take a look at Touchgraph.
Touchgraph is a Java application downloadable from the Web that can import a dataset, analyze the relationships, automatically determine groupings, and generate an interactive visualization.
In the case of Facebook, the Touchgraph Facebook application downloads the list of your friends and images and analyzes the relationships and connections between you and them and them and each other. You can explore the relationships by clicking on a node representing each of your friends and examine who knows who.
Touchgraph in the guise of the company’s Navigator2 product also allows you to upload your own information on any topic as long as it’s structured as an Excel table or can be extracted from a database through an SQL query. You can then filter and map the results, and display the analysis on a Web page.
When working with your own data you can associate text and numerical values with nodes and edges, and, for edges, associate images with nodes.
Touchgraph is remarkable in allowing both focused views such as the Facebook interface as well as allowing for amazing flexibility in handling the presentation of your own data.
If you are embarking on any kind of analysis on social networks, team management, data management or drama, Touchgraph is an outstanding solution.
