Nobody can deny that Facebook is extremely popular, and with over 250 Million active users it is the richest source of social connetivity data online. We have interfaced WiGis with the Facebook API. Now, you can use WiGi visualizations to explore your Social Network, discover your "Taste Cliques", and recieve personalized recommendations on Books, Movies and Music.
Although the current Facebook interface has many rich functionalities. There is a lot of information which is available through the API beneath, but not easy to discover through the standard html-based interface. Using the interactive visualizations provided here, you can easily discover new things about your friend network, from standard friend-cliques such as your High School mates, to complex taste-cliques which will help you determine how you developed your current tastes in Movies, Books and/or Music. Moreover, you can see who is popular/unpopular at a glance, identify outliers based on social connectivity or tastes, and find who your most similar friend is- based on social connectivity and/or on your tastes. The sections below explain a few sample Facebook layouts. There are more available under "layout" in the WiGi tool menu.
Notes: This is not a commercial application and may be buggy at times as we make various updates and try to keep up with Facebook changes. To ensure best performance, make sure you have some books and movies listed in your Facebook profile. Please use Firefox for best performance of this software.
Privacy Statement / Disclaimer
To access the Facebook API you will have to either log in to Facebook directly
and use the WiGi application or provide your credentials on this site. This system is
part of a funded research project at the Dept of Computer Science, University of
California, Santa Barbara. We guarantee that we will not store or share your login
credentials. We will not access your data in any way other than to generate a graph visualization
like the ones you see below. Users are free to use resulting visualizations for
non-profit functions. The developers would like to be mentioned if any images are published.
Facebook Social Network Layout: Tree Structure (based only on taste overlap with no friend associations shown)
The graph below was generated with my real facebook profile. The larger, yellow items in layer 3 are the most interesting since these represent books, movies and music which are very popular amongst my friends, but I do not yet have in my profile. This layout also shows who from my friend network has the most/least overlap in taste with me. (which in my case, happens to be my younger brother). This is illustrated by the pink box in layer 2, below.
Facebook Social Network Layout: Tree Structure, based on taste overlap with no friend associations.
The following graph shows the same inforamation as the previous one, but with a circular layout. Again, each layer has been highlighted and annotations are provided to explain the significance of each layer.
