Technogearophilia

Paul Butler, an intern at Facebook, made a map visualizing Facebook friendships. It is, as first glance, both interesting and compelling. Just by plotting Facebook users’ listed hometowns and mapping their online friendships Butler, who unsurprisingly is interning with Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering team, managed to create a map of the Earth and her cities just with a color ramp projection of those friendships.

Compare The Two Maps (Click to Enlarge)

It is interesting that Butler’s projection effectively drew the continents and even some national boundaries, but it’s not really surprising or a particularly great revelation.

Butler’s projection matches well with NASA’s light map of the Earth. That means it matches up well with regional population densities and technology levels, which shouldn’t be a shock to anyone.

In all likelihood, you could create the same map, or one damn close to it, by plotting the traffic to any set a major websites. The internet follows civilization and Facebook is part of the internet.