Social network map
If you were to draw lines representing your social connections to all your friends, your friends’ friends, and your friends’ friends’ friends, what would it look like? For Jeffrey Heer of the University of California, Berkeley, it looks like a big blue ball of glittery fuzz.
In this image, Heer is represented at the center of the fuzz ball as its brightest point, with his friends appearing second dimmest, and their friends still dimmer. The pattern continues through three degrees of separation. The resulting network encompasses 47,471 of Heer’s very closest confidants, all tangled together in a web of 432,430 friendship relations made over the social networking site Friendster.
Heer’s social network visualization project, Vizster, is an academic project intended to clarify the structure of online social communities and serve as a communications tool, but online marketers are very interested in procuring similar social maps. Facebook and other social networking sites already sell demographic information about their users to marketers, which in turn use it to deliver individuals customized ads (yeah, you agreed to that when you checked that box below the stuff you didn’t read during registration—see Joseph Turow’s “Niche Envy” for more information).
Information contained in social maps—like how many contacts a person has and whether those contacts were first initiated or received by that person—can be combined with ver-accumulating demographic information in databases to draw rough conclusions about a person’s social influence and the likelihood that they can and will buy certain products. Perhaps one day the diet people will know you’re fat, Haagen-Dazs will pop up to offer sweet escape when you break up with your boyfriend, and the fake Rolex makers will be able to sniff out the penniless and insecure without weighing down their trench coats with merchandise. It’s a brave new world indeed.