Facebook Interns Maps Global Friendships

Posted in: Blog by Chris on January 31, 2011 at 3:19 pm |

Paul Butler, an intern at Facebook, took a data sample of 10 million friendships and mapped them, creating the world’s first map of global Facebook friendships.

“I began by taking a sample of about 10 million pairs of friends from Apache Hive, our data warehouse,” he said in a post on Facebook.

“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.”

The global areas that shone most brightly were the eastern half of the US, Europe and parts of Indonesia. At the opposite end of the spectrum was China, Russia and central Africa.

Read more at the Herald Sun.