Visualizing Facebook Friends With D3.js or “How Wolfram|Alpha Does That Cool Friend Network Graph” by Tony Young.
From the post:
A while ago, Wolfram|Alpha got the ability to generate personal analytics based on your Facebook profile. It made some cool numbers and stuff, but the friend network graph was the most impressive:
Wolfram|Alpha neatly separates your various social circles into clusters, based on proximity — with freaky accuracy.
With the awesome D3.js library, along with some gratuitous abuse of the Facebook API, we can make our own!
If you’re impatient, skip through all this text and check out the example or the screenshot!
A good example of the ease of deduplication (read merging) where the source of ids is uniform.
Possible classroom exercise to create additional Facebook accounts for students, so that each student has at least two (2) Facebook accounts. Each with friend lists.
Any overlapping friends will “merge” but the different accounts don’t, even though the same person.
Walk through solving the merging problem where there are different accounts.
I first saw this in a tweet by Christophe Viau.