Facebook Intern Is Smarter Than You, Creates Data Visualization Of World Friendships

Monday, December 13th, 2010

Alexia Tsotsis works for TechCrunch as a writer. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles... → Learn More

Facebook engineering intern Paul Butler has created the stunning map of international human relationships above, using a ten million friend pair sample size from Facebook social graph data. His methodology?

“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.”

Hey Google HR people, Paul Butler. That’s P-A-U-L-B-U-T-L-E-R. Touch base with him on Facebook and/or on LinkedIn here. You’re welcome.

Company: Facebook
Website: facebook.com
Launch Date: February 1, 2004
Funding: $2.34B

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...

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