Visualization of the Week: Visualizing your friends’ Facebook likes

Tony Hirst's Facebook visualization shows "social interest positioning."

What do your Facebook friends have in common? (Well, other than all being your Facebook friend, of course.) What “likes” do they share?

Tony Hirst, a lecturer in the Department of Communication and Systems at The Open University, built a visualization that shows this connective data. He’s also a written a step-by-step guide on how he constructed the visualization with Google Refine and Gephi.

Sketching common likes amongst my facebook friends

The result is a network diagram of what Hirst’s friends commonly “like.” He notes:

“Rather than returning likes, I could equally have pulled back lists of the movies, music or books they like, their own friends lists (permissions settings allowing), etc, etc, and then generated friends’ interest maps on that basis.”

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