MetaFilter Contacts Map

March 21, 2007 2:38 PM

I used IBM's Many Eyes data visualization site [discussed] to create a network map of my MetaFilter contacts and my contacts' contacts. It got to be pretty big, so I thought I'd post it here.
posted by monju_bosatsu to MetaFilter-related at 2:38 PM (57 comments total)

Are you trying to take cortex's spot as the resident OCD Mefi indexer?
posted by dios at 2:40 PM on March 21, 2007

God, it looks like some kind of cancerous growth.
posted by chrismear at 2:50 PM on March 21, 2007

Cancerous growth? It looks like some sort of God.

When I worked at IBM, we'd have researchers come down to the call centers and ask for scads of call record data for autogenerated taxonomy tools, which they'd show off in scatter graphs and network graphs. They were at one incredibly cool and totally worthless to the managers because of the staggering amount of information present in a single graph: it literally blew their minds, and they refused to deal with it in any form.
posted by boo_radley at 3:02 PM on March 21, 2007 [2 favorites]

Whats up with Plutor's army over on the left?
posted by vacapinta at 3:03 PM on March 21, 2007

It literally blew their minds?

Also, that damn Java whoositwhatsit doesn't load for me. Corporate firewall crap, probably. Can't wait to check it out when I get home.
posted by cortex at 3:03 PM on March 21, 2007

Also, it reminds me of the social graph of the early Flickverse.
posted by vacapinta at 3:05 PM on March 21, 2007

it also literally ran them off their feet.
posted by shmegegge at 3:06 PM on March 21, 2007

literally.
posted by boo_radley at 3:06 PM on March 21, 2007

Wow, cool. I especially like the way the map shows people's "posses" -- like mathowie and jessamyn's sets of people who link to him and only him. Plutor and loquacious have sizable posses too.
posted by ontic at 3:09 PM on March 21, 2007

Oh, yes, I see, quite humorful. No, it did not literally blow up their minds. They sat, in the dark, around the conference table, slack-jawed and glassy-eyed staring at the projector, like apes confronted with a monolith, incapable of the crudest utterance; bereft of the crudest congnition of what was presented to them.
posted by boo_radley at 3:11 PM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

I hope someone put on some Strauss.
posted by cortex at 3:13 PM on March 21, 2007 [4 favorites]

btw: how on earth, monju, did you input this information? was many eyes simply able to understand the mefi contact structure and absorb it directly or did you and 10 apparently cast iron fingers input it all?
posted by shmegegge at 3:14 PM on March 21, 2007

At some time in 2001 or 2002 I wrote a perl script that used GraphViz to make a visualization of the friends/foes relationship of slashdot users. However, in order to get this information it had to spider every user account page, and I quickly got banned by their automatic "you're hitting us too much" scripts. But even with the data I did have by that point, the graph was soon way too large with too many edges to be of any practical value.
posted by Rhomboid at 3:14 PM on March 21, 2007

I just copied the lists of contacts from my contacts' contacts pages and fed it all into Excel. Keep in mind that this is just my contacts +1. There are undoubtedly lots of missing connections that could be caught if I went to my contacts +2, but the work to do so manually would increase exponentially. Literally.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 3:17 PM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

Wow, even I'm on there. I thought I was only popular on Metachat and in Portland.
posted by matildaben at 3:25 PM on March 21, 2007

If I was really stoned I bet I could keep clicking the Reset Viewpoint button for a looong time.
posted by Cyrano at 3:36 PM on March 21, 2007

Would make for an interesting meet-up. Everyone seems to have their seating assignments.
posted by hal9k at 3:43 PM on March 21, 2007

I'm either less popular than I give myself credit for. Or I'm a hydrogen molecule.
posted by hal9k at 3:46 PM on March 21, 2007

Interesting to see who the most connected people are.
Dissapointingly, I only connect to two people.
posted by seanyboy at 3:48 PM on March 21, 2007

A little Excel jiggery-pokery tells me that there are 1331 unique users on the network map, which means that my contacts average about 19 contacts each.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 3:54 PM on March 21, 2007

The big players appear to be:

jessamyn
cortex
mathowie
loquasious
languagehat
madamjujujive
taz
schyler523

Interesting.
posted by seanyboy at 3:57 PM on March 21, 2007

And y2karl.
posted by seanyboy at 3:59 PM on March 21, 2007

I'd love to see the full map, too. monju+1, while an admirable and handsome group, isn't enough, damn it all. I wonder if we could arrange a dump of the contact connections from the db proper—and, ooh, with the relationship toggles we could even do multiple maps, or color-coding, to express some of the details.
posted by cortex at 4:00 PM on March 21, 2007

Here's a tag cloud from the same data.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 4:02 PM on March 21, 2007

Who's loquasious?

That's making me feel slightly nauceous.
posted by matildaben at 4:05 PM on March 21, 2007

It's nice to see "Anonymous Ask Metafilter" linking to people. His or her life is so fucked up, it's good to know he or she has friends.
posted by fandango_matt at 4:21 PM on March 21, 2007 [2 favorites]

The format of the data file is pretty simple. Maybe Mr. Howie will dump it.
posted by smackfu at 4:35 PM on March 21, 2007

I would like to see a giant-ass PNG of the metafilter network as well.
posted by boo_radley at 4:37 PM on March 21, 2007

I'm on there, but I also appear to be epimorph.
posted by Eideteker at 4:43 PM on March 21, 2007

Can you take a screenshot? It ain't working for me in firefox on my mac. Maybe my java junk is out of date.
posted by mathowie at 4:47 PM on March 21, 2007

It works with Safari, Matt.
posted by fandango_matt at 4:55 PM on March 21, 2007

[NSFPeopleWhoHateJava]
posted by DU at 4:59 PM on March 21, 2007

Here's a screenshot. Obviously, playing with the live version is more interesting.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 5:14 PM on March 21, 2007

I feel so....small.
posted by mrmojoflying at 5:15 PM on March 21, 2007

Interesting that I have a lot of people linking to me yet only a few links on the graph. Meaning, I think, that most of those who link to me aren't in this network (monju+1 doesn't link to them). Also, that I'm not cool. Also, that I am a failure in social reciprocity since I don't link to most of the people who link to me (if I had, they'd be in this network).
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 5:37 PM on March 21, 2007

So sad, so sad. I'm going to go make myself a cookie and then eated it.
posted by maxwelton at 5:39 PM on March 21, 2007

I'm so lonely.
posted by nowonmai at 5:45 PM on March 21, 2007

Haha, Dhoyt is on there.
posted by delmoi at 5:51 PM on March 21, 2007

How many times is dhoyt on there, delmoi? That is the question.
posted by cgc373 at 6:51 PM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

Jessamyn ftw.
And I bet good honest English money she cares the least about it too.
posted by dash_slot- at 7:11 PM on March 21, 2007

I roll with Plutor, apparently. We'll get jackets made and rumble with the Sharks and Jets in front of the school at midnight, then.
posted by boo_radley at 8:05 PM on March 21, 2007

Well. That was pretty cool, but I only stayed long enough to get a glimpse and to determine if and where I was in there. (I am.)

Then my cpu fan revved dangerously high, and continued to ramp up until my desk shook and I feared the fan would launch through the wall, leaving a flaming hole and a dissipating smoke trail out into the parking lot.
posted by exlotuseater at 8:19 PM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

One bullet will take you all out.
posted by peacay at 8:53 PM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

OK, so... is tkchrist exlotuseater lying?
posted by cgc373 at 8:54 PM on March 21, 2007

I hate client-side Java, but I love stuff like this. Thanks for the new toy!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 10:01 PM on March 21, 2007

Neat! Can you make it work for my network and make it all springy too?
posted by fenriq at 10:30 PM on March 21, 2007

That graph is kinda weird. It shows me only having two connections, but I saw quite a few of my contacts on the graph connecting to other people.
posted by cmonkey at 12:51 AM on March 22, 2007

If it were my contact map - it would be much easier on the eye.

.
posted by strawberryviagra at 5:33 AM on March 22, 2007

Fear the MeFi Puppetmasters
posted by xthlc at 7:30 AM on March 22, 2007

*pulls strings, laughs evilly*

DANCE, PUPPETS, DANCE!

*feels tug on back, turns around, sees jessamyn giving him the Librarian Look*

*sits down, shuts up*
posted by languagehat at 7:45 AM on March 22, 2007

When she can't still you with the Look
She'll do it with the shepherd's crook
So you best return that book to
The Librarian

She's got more decimals than Dewey
And stares down decibels like Chewy
So you best not try and screw wi'
The Librarian
posted by cortex at 8:02 AM on March 22, 2007

Thanks boo_radley - at this rate I'll be crashing the many eye render engine in no time!
posted by strawberryviagra at 6:05 PM on March 22, 2007

My dot is larger than I thought it would be. Go me.
posted by deborah at 3:19 AM on March 23, 2007

This is really cool, monju. I wonder what it would take to convince mathowie to make the entire MeFi database available à la Wikipedia's Database Download. It's all publicly available anyway, and I just know there are armies of perl-script-wielding stat-monsters out there just waiting to show us the Index Of Members Ordered By Most Uses Of The Word Flange. Having the database accessible without screen-scraping could turn up all kinds of wondrous creations.
posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 4:28 AM on March 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

Well, my visualization is now featured on the Many Eyes home page. Yay!
posted by monju_bosatsu at 3:09 PM on March 24, 2007

Matt, if one were to write a utility to scrape something like all the contacts for each user, at what rate of access would be acceptable to you? There's 50K users, so would once-a-second be okay? A half-minute?
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 3:29 PM on March 24, 2007

I'm trapped in an arm of the Cortex galaxy with a bunch of other nobodys. What a rip off!
posted by absalom at 4:13 PM on March 27, 2007