Man draws a map of the world using Facebook

By Sahil Mohan Gupta | Updated: 11 June 2012 15:56 IST

Highlights

Interested in drawing maps? Try using Facebook for this. Yeah that’s what exactly Paul Butler did. He constructed a map of the world using over 10 million Facebook connections and joining them.

Interested in drawing maps? Try using Facebook for this. Yeah that's what exactly Paul Butler did. He constructed a map of the world using over 10 million Facebook connections and joining them.

We can clearly identify regions of Russia, South America and Australia not having defined structures in the map. This could account for the lack of penetration achieved by Facebook in these regions.

On the flipside we can see the region of North America, Western Europe and our very own India having detailed structures accounting for the heavy Facebook activity in these regions.

According to Paul Butler, "I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line's color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.''

He explained further, "After a few minutes of rendering, the new plot appeared, and I was a bit taken aback by what I saw. The blob had turned into a surprisingly detailed map of the world. Not only were continents visible, certain international borders were apparent as well. What really struck me, though, was knowing that the lines didn't represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships. Each line might represent a friendship made while traveling, a family member abroad, or an old college friend pulled away by the various forces of life.''

He finally concluded on how he managed to get the shapes right.

"Later I replaced the lines with great circle arcs, which are the shortest routes between two points on the Earth. Because the Earth is a sphere, these are often not straight lines on the projection."

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