Wow… Stunning! But what the heck this image is? It looks beautiful but question stands still. Let me tell you briefly, it is a graph plotted between a pair of cities depending on number of Facebook friends between those two. It was done by Facebook intern, yes I-N-T-E-R-N, Paul Buttler. I bet this read will give you detailed insight about Facebook popularity across the globe as well as some Geographical knowledge. This visual clearly depicts that China, Russia and Japan are the places where Facebook is not happening and for rest it is spreading like a deadly wildfire.

Geographical Analysis of 500 million Facebook Friend Connections:

Let’s find out, which part of world is crazy for Facebook and which one is untouched, more importantly why. Below look at the region tagged with number and find few facts about it in description part.

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1. China:
First question came into my mind was, ohh!! What is wrong with Facebook in China, which has 300 million active Internet users? Facebook is still virgin here. Somehow I managed to find few of the reasons. Firstly, China is well occupied by local social networks QQ (qzone.qq.com) and 51.com with 200 and 130 million users respectively. Secondly, it is a matter of minutes for Chinese authority to ban any website. Facebook faced ban here somewhere in 2009. Not only Facebook but Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Live, Hotmail, WordPress, YouTube, Blogger etc have faced ban here one or more time. At this instance, surely I would like to appreciate USA, which hasn’t blocked Wikileaks yet. Hats off to Uncle Sam!

Please note, these bans were not applicable in Hongkong, a part of China, who has its own Internet legal system. In addition to that, I found few more illuminating dots in China and I suspect those might be hackers, trying to bring down Facebook.

2. India:
Facebook is uno numero in India, it is official. As per ComScore statistics, Facebook with 20.9 million users has just surpassed Orkut with 19.9 million visitors in July 2010. Believe me, it is just beginning, Facebook is catching up very rapidly in India. Orkut which was ranked first just before few months is now just old fashioned. Not having account in Facebook will lead to immediate question ‘Are you still on Orkut?’ plus weird expression.

3. USA and Canada:
Perhaps it is the most illuminating part of map, so the self explanatory.

4. Africa:
It looks like Dark Ocean. Except South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya, Internet has exceptionally low penetration, so does the Facebook.

5. Europe:
It looks second most illuminating part. Facebook seems invincible social network in US and Europe.

6. Russia:
It is dominated by VKontakte social network with 104 million users as of December, 2010. So, Facebook needs to struggle hard to capture this region.

7. Brazil:
Orkut remains the first choice and it is far ahead in the game. Facebook has achieved quite a little here.

8. Rest Asia:
In Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand, Facebook is roaring already. Mixi is what Japan is up to.

How this Facebook friend graph was plotted?

Excerpt of what Paul has to say about his work is,

“I began exploring it in R, an open-source statistics environment. I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line’s color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.”

Yeah, it is bit difficult to understand explanation in one shot because after all we are not Facebook intern. However, it is not as difficult as it seems. Let me put it in simple manner,

• Use R- Project for statistical computing for plotting the graph
• Calculate weight for each pair of cities, w = function(Euclidean distance between those two, number of friends between those two). Please note Euclidean distance is nothing but the straight line distance.
• Plot the line between those two cities depending upon weight value. Line illumination is directly proportional to weight.

I hope you would have loved Paul’s work, if yes then do let your friends know about it. Share it!

Source of Information: 1, 2, 3