So, I was listening to my very first podcast the other day (yeah, I’m pretty slow with anything Apple. A technology geek was being interviewed about a set of applications that he created, one of which is called the TouchGraph Facebook Browser. This is a facebook application that analyzes your friends and how they’ve tagged you in photos to create a graph of your relationships. Based on the photo-tagging patterns and frequency of tagging, the app creates a graph that, in theory, should display relationships of your friends.
Here’s what mine looks like (click, it gets bigger, I swear…):
Just so you know, I’m Rick, the goofy-looking guy in the middle. The app displays my various friends around me. You’ll notice that, using different colors, the app creates ‘neighborhoods’ of my friends. It also selectively displays certain friends closer to me than others. My observations:
* The people who display closest to me on this graph are mostly people whom I spend the most time with and are closest to.
* The color breakdown fairly accurate separates my family members (peach) from my close friends (red) from friends whom I don’t see too often (other colors).
Why I think this is creepy
Considering the limited amount of data used to create this graph (image tags), TouchGraph has drawn a chart depicting my relationships with decent accuracy. When I think about how much more data Facebook, Google and other data-whores has about me, I’m pretty sure that they know more about me by now than I do about myself. Since I know that they’re warehousing all this data, I hope that they put it to good use someday. Maybe they can send me a report that tells me more about me. Or, when I die, at least give my loved ones a summary about my life. Hell, if they are going to use this information to sell me shit (targeted advertising) my whole life, I think I should get something for it at some point.
If you want to be creeped-out as well, login to facebook and get the app here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=3267890192.
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