SocViz: Visualization of Facebook Data
Abhinav S Bhatele
Abstract
Department of Computer Science
Visualization of social networks is a very common
theme in the field of sociology, psychology and human
computer interfaces (HCI). In this paper, we describe
the work done on the data obtained from a social
networks’ website called Facebook. Facebook was
started in February 2004 and is fairly popular among
college students. The study involved understanding the
API supported by Facebook and the range of data
available to us, a user study to determine what
visualizations would be the most useful to Facebook
users
and
then
the
actual
implementation.
Implementation involved a detailed analysis of the best
visualizations and feedback from user groups during
the course of the project.
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
Urbana, IL 61801 USA
[email protected]
Kyratso Karahalios
Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
Urbana, IL 61801 USA
[email protected]
The implementation was completed in two phases. The
first phase involved visualizations of birthdays and
zodiac signs of all the people in a user’s social network.
Different views were tested and then some finalized.
The second phase involved user studies on the first
phase and modifications based on them. The major part
of the second phase was new visualizations for views of
wall posts vs. time and for the social network based on
zodiac signs.
Keywords
Copyright is held by the author(s).
Class: CS598kgk, Fall 2006
Department of Computer Science, UIUC, Urbana, IL, USA
Social network, visualization, Facebook, zodiac signs,
wall posts, user studies
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ACM Classification Keywords
J4. Computer Applications: Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Keywords: Sociology, Human Factors.
Introduction
The last few years have seen a huge proliferation of
social network websites on the internet. It started with
websites like Friendster [8] and Myspace [12] and has
become a never-ending spree to form the largest social
networks possible. Most of these websites work on the
principle of six degrees of separation formulated by
Milgram in his ‘Small World’ experiment in 1967 [11].
Facebook is one such website which was started for
college and high school students in February 2004. As
per the website [2], it now has over 13 million
registered users across 40,000 networks.
What attracts people most, in sum, is
other people.
- William H. Whyte
Facebook provides an Application Programmable
Interface [3] for developers to use publicly accessible
social network data. The aim of this project was to
select some of this data and visualize it to give some
meaningful information to Facebook users. The data
available is for any Facebook user and his circle of
friends and spans from personal information to
demographic data, education, work history, interests,
clubs and other Facebook network related data. So the
first question in consideration was to choose the subset
of data to visualize. For this, we chose to do an online
poll giving the users various options and asked them to
say if they would like to see a particular data in this
application or not.
Once we had narrowed down the data we were going to
look at, we set goals for the two phases of the project.
The first phase would be concerned with the
visualization of birthdays and zodiac signs of a user and
his friends. The idea was to look at the birthdays of a
user and his friends and to see if there exists some
correlation between the friends and their birthdays (like
are they from some particular zodiac?). The second
phase would deal with visualizations of wall posts and
social network. Wall posts are messages left by a user
on another user’s profile page (a portion of it called the
‘wall’). The number of wall posts is a measure of how
close you are to a certain friend and also of how active
a certain user is on facebook. Social network
visualizations are a common phenomenon and help us
see how we are related to different people in our social
network.
This paper is organised into six sections: First section is
the introduction which gives an overview of the paper.
The second section discusses the motivation and
related work. The third section talks about the online
poll we did to collect user statistics. The fourth section
discusses the implementation of the project (birthday,
wall post and social network visualizations). The fifth
section looks at the possible additions to the project
and future work. The last section is the conclusion.
Motivation and Related Work
This quote by William H. Whyte on the left sums up the
motivation for this project quite well. We wanted to see
what attracts people towards other people. How do
cliques get formed in a social network? Do zodiac signs
have an effect? We also wanted to design an
application which Facebook users could use to get
aggregated information about their social network in a
single view (like which of their friends is the most
active or who writes the most on their wall). Another
aim was the clustering of the social network by
different criteria and see if some of them make more
sense than the others.
Before starting to work on our project, we looked at the
already available options. More then a dozen projects
developed by individual people are available on the
Facebook Product Directory website [4] itself. When we
had started working on this project, there were about
ten and now there are more than sixty on the website.
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Lots of them deal with just a plain visualization of a
user’s social network in a point-line diagram,
sometimes over a geographical map [5, 7, 9, 10].
Some of them like the Date Machina [1] have been
developed to facilitate online dating through Facebook.
There is just one project called Friendly Views [6] which
talks about birthdays but the only functionality it gives
at present is to download the birthdays in calendar
format (iCal or CSV).
Online Poll: A User Study
User studies are a good place to start to get a rough
idea of what would be best and most useful to the
users of an application. To get a head start, we started
with an online poll [13]. There were eight questions to
be answered in yes or no depending on if you would
like to see a certain data from Facebook in this
application or not. The questions and the number of
votes in favour of it are listed here. A total of 22 people
participated in this online poll. We also approached a
few people in person to get their views.
Number of Messages (Read and Unread) and how
they change with time (along a week, a month or an
year) - 9

Number of wall posts and their change (along a
week, a month or an year) - 13

Change in the cover photo (on your profile) over
time - 11

Changes in your profile with time, like changes in
your favourite music bands, movies, "About me",
"Favorite Quotes" etc .... - 11

Birthdays of your friends on a full month/year
calendar - 18

Changes in your and your friends' photo albums
over time, how photographs changed, how new people
were tagged, etc ... - 11

A network showing your friends in different views like one with those friends which share common
interests, common groups - 19

Number and details of events you and your friends
went to over the month (or year) - 4

As the results of the poll show, visualizations of
birthdays and the social network emerged as clear
winners. At the third place was visualization of the
number of wall posts and their change with respect to
time. It should be noted that at the time of this poll, we
did not restrict ourselves to data available from
Facebook’s API. So, as we will see in the
implementation section, to come up with a visualization
of the wall posts data, we had to manually collect the
information over a period of time.
Implementation
In this section, we will discuss the design decisions that
went into the development of the views and how they
emerged as you see them here. We start with a
discussion of the birthday/zodiac visualizations and
then move on to views of wall posts. Finally we discuss
how we choose the clustering criterion for the social
network and came up with the visualization for it.
Zodiacs
Our first attempt was to display the birthdays of a user
and all of his/ her friends on a full year’s calendar. We
chose to do it by the months and by the zodiac signs.
The first visualization which we see here in Figure 1 is a
representation of a user and his friends by their
birthdays. Each person is represented by a small
coloured circle whose placement is on a 2D grid with
days on the X axis and months on the Y axis. The
colour depends on the colour associated with your
zodiac sign.
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interesting because a user generally has friends of the
same age and most friends landed up in the same or
the next zodiac sign as the user.
We then thought of combining the traditional Greek and
Chinese zodiac and see if that yielded interesting
results. The technique used there was to place the
circles for each user in the space by their Chinese
zodiac sign but to colour them by the Greek zodiac.
This hybrid view was visually appealing but confusing
and did not give us the desired combining effect we
were looking for. These two views can be found in the
appendix.
Figure 1. Panel showing the birthdays of a user and his friends
in a calendar view based on their Greek zodiac. The signs start
from Aries at the top left to Pisces at the bottom left.
This view is only useful if the user has
a few friends, so that he can see their
names
and
birthdays
displayed
clearly.
If you see carefully, the months on the right start from
March-April because that corresponds to the first zodiac
sign of Aries and go on till February-March which
corresponds to Pisces. You can click on a circle to see
the friend's photograph, name and his birthday (as
seen in the yellow pop-up in Figure 1). This feature was
added after a user study was done in the middle of the
design phase.
We came up with another view which is strictly by the
Greek zodiac signs and shows your friends in a circular
space which is divided into 12 zones (see the figure on
the left). In this view, you can look at the names and
birthdays and see their zodiac signs too.
The next idea that came up was to try other traditional
zodiacs and hence we thought of looking at the Chinese
zodiac. Chinese zodiac is not by months but by years.
They still have twelve zodiac signs, one for each year
and then they repeat. This view turned out to be not so
Figure 2. View displaying the wall counts of each user along a
time axis.
Wall posts
With wall post visualizations, we started the second
phase of the project. Wall posts give a rough idea of
how active a user is on Facebook. Here the idea was to
come up with a view of wall posts of all friends on a
time axis. The first issue which came up was that the
Facebook API does not give a history of the wall count
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(number of wall posts) of a user. So, we had to
manually collect (retrieve and store) this information
daily for over a month. This also meant that this
feature can not be used for an arbitrary user whose
information has not been stored by the application over
a period of time.
meaningful. Some users had complained about the
limited use of the circular zodiac view (because of a
limit on the number of friends). So we decided to omit
the picture in the middle and instead use the central
part of the circle to display relations between a user’s
friends.
In this visualization (Figure 2), we can see how the wall
count of a user increased over a month. This is a
cumulative view and hence we always see rising lines.
The change of colours across the spectrum shows a
variation in the number of wall posts. Users with very
few posts are on the red end while the ones with the
maximum posts are on the violet end. We also came up
with another not-so interesting view of the average
number of wall posts over a month.
Figure 3 shows the visualization we came up. The
circular space is divided into twelve zones representing
the twelve zodiacs. A friend is placed into a certain part
depending on his birthday and gets a corresponding
colour depending on the zodiac. Lines are drawn
between friends of the user who are friends of each
other. The user is shown by a circle surrounded by
another white one. No lines are drawn from the user to
all his friends because that connection is obvious.
Future Work
We developed a website [14] for the application to
reach a larger group. It would be good to get this
desktop application running as a web application on the
website. As we came up with the different
visualizations, we kept receiving comments from
friends on making the application more user-friendly,
useful and obvious. First, there is scope to come up
with a better hybrid view between the Chinese and
Greek zodiac which tries to combine the too instead of
dividing them.
This snapshot is for a user with over
seventy friends. As we can see, there
seems to be absolutely no pattern and it
is totally random (as one would expect).
Figure 3. View showing the social network of a user clustered
by the zodiac signs.
Social Network
This was the last part and most difficult because we
had to come up with a clustering criterion to display a
social network and ensure that it shows something
The wall posts visualizations could be enhanced by
having a view where the number of wall posts from all
friends to the particular user could be seen. This would
help by showing who wrote on the user’s wall the most
every month. This feature does not exist in the
application at present. It might also be worth a try to
implement wall posts per day vs. time rather than the
cumulative view. For the social network view, it would
be interesting if people could mouse-over a certain
friend and see this friend’s connections highlighted to
look for any patterns. Since this work is still a
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prototype, there are a lot of modifications possible
which would make it better and there is scope to try
out many new different ideas too.
Finally, I sincerely thank Prof. Kyratso Karahalios for
her constructive guidance and help all along.
References
Conclusion
[1]
Date Machina: http://matchdust.com/.
The entire application was implemented in Java and
uses the basic features of Java 2D. The interface is
fairly simple to use and intuitive. Users who tested the
application were delighted by the calendar view of the
birthdays of all their friends. It was exciting for them to
see all the birthdays together on one small screen.
They also liked the use of different colours on a black
background and the use of circular spaces for zodiacs.
[2]
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/.
This work was just a preliminary take on what could be
possibly done with the vast amount of data the
Facebook API provides. Because of the limited time we
had, we could only try a few things. We would like to
explore visualizations of other things too in the future.
Although, I was working on such a project for the first
time, it was an absolute delight working on it and
showing those beautiful views to friends.
[7]
friendmap: http://beta.flagr.com/friendmap/.
[8]
 Friendster: http://www.friendster.com/.
Acknowledgements
[12] Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/.
I thank all the students who took the poll I created and
the users of my application who gave me valuable
feedback during the design process. I also wish to
thank my lab mates who would look at my work in
progress and pass remarks which helped a lot.
[13] Online Poll:
http://charm.cs.uiuc.edu/~bhatele/socviz/facebookpoll.php.
[3] Facebook API:
http://developers.facebook.com/documentation.php.
[4] Facebook Product Directory:
http://developers.facebook.com/products.php.
[5]
Friend Mapper: http://www.booksnearme.com/fb/.
[6] Friendly Views:
http://www.friendlyviews.com/maps/hometown.php.
[9] FriendVis V2:
http://www.boredonthebook.com/index.php?display=fri
endvis.
[10] Interactive Friend Thing:
http://friendthing.trigse.cx/.
[11] Milgram, S. The Small World
Individual in a Communicative Web.
Problem.
[14] SocViz Website:
http://charm.cs.uiuc.edu/~bhatele/socviz/.
The
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Appendix
Here are snapshots of the views for two other
visualizations of the zodiac: Chinese and Hybrid. Figure
4 shows the Chinese zodiac.
Figure 5 shows the hybrid view. Here the space is
divided by the Chinese zodiac but the colour is assigned
by the traditional Greek zodiac. This view looks
interesting but doesn’t give any useful information.
Figure 4. The Chinese Zodiac View.
Figure 5. The Hybrid View.