My Social Network Map

Here is a project I have been working on for the last couple of days.

After Facebook updated their look, how could anyone help but notice the number of comments from people who were just unable to find anything to like about how the new theme looked or worked. At first, I wasn't really sure what had changed. And that is because the majority of my interaction with Facebook isn't via Facebook's site. Most of the time, when something happens on FB that might get my attention, I either get an e-mail or I happen to notice the FB widget on my Chumby. And my normal means of sending content to Facebook is via any number of sites that are not Facebook's client. So, to be honest, I'm not really sure what Facebook looked like on 10 March to be able to even judge what it has looked like since 11 March. I honestly couldn't tell you much of anything about how Facebook has looked since I joined about 2-1/2 years ago, other than to say it is white and blue.
I actually feel bad a little about how I use FB.

Or should I say don't use FB.

Back in November, I said in a FB comment how I was updating the set of social tools that I use.

It is fairly obvious that this attempt at explaining what I was doing was very unsuccessful.

A couple of days ago, thinking about Facebook's updates, and a couple of other items I have in the queue for blog posts, I came up with the idea of diagram for how I use the various social networking tools I do use.

I was surprised that there were 21 items on the map.  Click on the map to see it better.  It really is larger than what you see here (larger size).  Not everything in the diagram is actually a "social networking site."  I included sites that connect to the tools I do use.  There are more sites, forums and whatnot that I use that have social aspects, but the tools not in the diagram do not connect to the things that are.  And before anyone goes and starts thinking I'm really overly social, please realize that the raw number of connections I have on ALL these sites, not accounting for friends and family I connect to on more than one site, is 137 connections.  Even if I had only one networking tool with that number of connections, that is a really small number.

The made made using Graphviz's DOT. The images for the logos came from the home pages of the various sites referenced. The graph evolved over time, as dot automatically routed the connections on the map. Each arrow on the diagram shows how information flows from one site to another, push or pull doesn't matter. I think this version still has at least one incorrect double arrow, but I don't think that is going to change much of anything, so I'm going to leave it as is.

As I get some more free time, I am going to add some additional information to the map. Hopefully I can use this to see how valuable each of the networks is to me.

And hopefully I can use this to prune the connections down so that I don't cause so many duplicate posts on Facebook. One problem of not actually going to Facebook's site is that I don't see the duplicate posts show up. But now I know they are there.