The global village explained, by a Facebook intern [Visualisation]

Facebook intern Paul Butler was interested in seeing how political borders affect friendships around the globe. So he created a map of the world by sampling data from the social network’s 500-million user base.

The map, highlighted above, displays friendships as lights on a deep blue background. The eastern half of the United States and Europe shine the brightest, while sparsely populated or economically poor parts of China, Russia and central Africa, where Facebook has little presence, are mainly dark. The bright spots in Africa are not surprisingly the economic and internet hubs of the continent: South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and various countries in North Africa. Of all the emerging markets, India and parts of China and South America shine the brightest, perhaps confirming their status as growing internet powers.

“I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends,” wrote Butler, who interns on the social network’s data infrastructure engineering team.

“I wanted a visualisation that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them.”

Butler says he started the experiment by sampling data from Facebook’s data warehouse, Apache Hive. He then used R, an open-source language and environment for statistical computing and graphics, to help analyse and plot the data.

“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,” he said.

Butler says the experiment was more than just a “pretty picture”.

“When I shared the image with others within Facebook, it resonated with many people… it’s a reaffirmation of the impact we have in connecting people, even across oceans and borders.”

Memeburn reckons the next experiment should focus on a visualisation of intercontinental friendship links, excluding local friendship lines. We truly live in a global village, don’t we?

Lights from space

The similarity between the world-famous “Earth Lights From Space” image and the Facebook friend map is striking. The satellite image below shows distribution patterns of light sources and electricity across Earth. Seeing the two images in conjunction demonstrates the obvious cross-over between Facebook penetration, internet penetration and economic development.