Mapping Facebook’s friendships

Last December, Paul Butler, an intern on Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering team, posted a visualization that examined a subset of the relations between Facebook users. Users were positioned in their respective cities and arcs denoted friendships.

Paul extracted the data and started playing with it. As he put it:

There is definitely discovery involved in the process of creating a visualization, where by giving visual attributes to otherwise invisible data, you create a form for data to embody.