The world through Facebook's eyes

This image was created by Paul Butler, who structures the data collected by Facebook, starting from approximately 10,000,000 pairs of friends.

In practice, each user was geolocated with a dot at the location of their city of residence. The various cities were then connected by lines whose color (from dark blue to white) depends on the number of friends who live in the two cities.

Obviously, it's not possible to clearly discern the individual lines. Instead, it's interesting to observe how the planet is drawn and, above all, to see the dark areas that aren't always caused by the digital divide, as is the case in Africa. Often, in fact, the void depends on the fact that in some countries, such as China, Russia, and Brazil, there are local social networks that Facebook hasn't yet managed to dismantle (QZone, VKontakte, and Orkut, respectively).

The image is very large. Click to enlarge. Here the original article by Paul Butler.

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