Everybody sing!

[kickaha]

So after a party last night where once again ginkgo and I ran into friends that we had *NO IDEA* knew the hostess, we decided tonight to make a chart.

In the grand tradition of the UWBB Boink Chart, we used Omnigroup's OmniGraffle. We added folks we know, how everyone met each other, current relationships, who *knows* who (a graph we elided ourselves from, since by default we know everyone on the chart), etc. It certainly doesn't have everybody we know on it, but it's the 50 people we think were most central to friends groups we know, here and in Seattle.

AFTER extracting ourselves from the 'who knows who' graph, guess how many graphs there are of connected folks?

One.

50 people, four cities, three universities, two coasts, and one graph.

Which means we have *NO* groups of friends that don't somehow, *independent of us*, connect to everyone else. Nobody left connected on the graph was introduced *by* us.

It's quite the diagram.

So everybody together now... "It's a small world, after all..."

Comments

[arthane.livejournal.com]

Friendship circles, particularly those involving computer aficionados, are incestuous lil' buggers.

If only that were the case...

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

This graph includes comp geeks, naturally, but also biology folks, archeologists, social workers, and many other realms, *most* of which have nothing to do with computers, or live online like we do.

Heh.

[flinx.livejournal.com]

I certainly wouldn't mind seeing a copy of that at some point, just for the heck of it. It sounds a lot like what some of the geeks at Brandeis tried doing in my last year there. They made it a little more complicated by trying to also indicate what kind of relations people had. I stopped paying attention when they claimed they needed to add a 4th dimension to get it displayed properly... *sigh*

Re: Heh.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Oh, I did that by using layers. :)

OmniGraffle is like a nice-to-use Visio. I have one layer of 'People', with all the people objects, then another of 'Met' that links them based on how they met, yet another called 'CurrRels' for current relationships, etc. I can selectively turn off layers, so for instance, I can say "show me all the paths through which people met each *other*, then overlay the primary path through which *I* met them, now add in the layer of who knows who directly".

The really cool bit is that OG has an 'auto-layout' feature, so I can turn on some layers, auto-layout, and it'll make a nice graph. Then I can turn off some of those, turn on others, re-layout, and again, a nice graph.

I tried it with all layers on, and my dear GOD was it nasty.

[labrown.livejournal.com]

Has anyone mentioned lately that yer a geek? :-)

So, when do we see the business plan for a startup company to provide this as the next great social networking service?

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

orkut.com

:D

[gwyneira.livejournal.com]

Oh, man, the Boink Chart! Now there's something I haven't thought about in a really long time.... :)

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it's still around...

More scarily, I wonder if it's still being updated...