Friendsters map Peter Cho For my database-related self portrait, I was interested in thinking about web-based social networks. The one that started it for me was Friendster, though I've had some run-ins with other sites (Six Degrees, Orkut, Tribe, Linked In, Live Journal, etc.). These sites capture a strange slice of the people who make up the personal networks around you. Choosing to opt in for some is like the famous Groucho Marx quote, "I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member." Clearly this is not the case for members of these sites. My self-portrait takes my set of friendsters as of mid-April 2004 and maps them against myself. In the graphs below, my identity is represented as the origin point, and different criteria such as age, when a member joined Friendster (from earliest to most recent), how many Friendsters a member has in his/her network, or physical coordinates are assigned to the x or y axes by dragging the labels from lower-left onto the corresponding axis line. Buttons in the upper-right turn on or off different identifying characterstics of the friendsters. Open the applet in a new window. ![]() ![]() ![]() |