By now, I’m sure you’re all familiar with the awesome map that Facebook intern Paul Butler made. Here’s a snapshot & link to the original post (definitely worth the read):
What was amazing to me was how connections (“friendships”) are location-dependant, or more specifically country-dependant.
What I really wanted to see were the actual outlines of countries on the map.
After an hour or so, here is what i had. (Click the map for the larger version, so you can actually see the countries in 1920 × 1200)
Things I noticed:
- The line between US & Canada is very visible east of Vancouver and West of the Great Lakes. It seems like there are not many connections there
- The mexico/US border is not as distinct as the CAD/US border.. that could be pure population though
- Russia & China are almost non-existent. Mark has talked about this a lot, how they are the final two countries Facebook has failed to assimilate. Russia has their own Facebook clone that has taken off.
- CUBA!! actually seems to have a small resistance using FB in the north west, but the rest is virtually non-exsistent
- The immediate drop off of facebook users (& connections) after Eastern Europe is crazy…
- The distinction between North & South Korea is amazing
- I was surprised to find it looks that more people are “connected” in Edmonton (north) rather than Calgary (South) in Alberta. Since I am from Calgary, and it’s a bigger city, that was interesting to me. My friends that went to Edmonton for University did say they loved the friendships they had there better. Where as University of Calgary is much more of a commuting university.
- Most non-saturated countries begin like Vitenam – with major cities really getting on board, and slowly making connections to their local friends.
- Conversely, the christmas Islands are unlike most other islands where only major cities have connections. These islands seem to have already started to get saturated!
- Europe really does have a lot of people really close to each other… its crazy
- You can really see the cities/countries in Africa that are using facebook: Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, a bit in Ghana…
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Thoughts? I’d love to hear them in the comments below. I’m working on a follow-up post (or I may just update this one) explaining how I did it.
There’s also a great conversation going on Hacker News
NOTE:
– I did not make this map so please don’t sue me. Paul Butler, a facebook intern did, and the links are noted in the first paragraph. I also did not make the Google Maps – google did. You can get the google maps here and the Facebook Map is here:
Jon Chui 