Found a reason to join Facebook...

I have been poking about at Facebook recently and have been surprised both by the silliness and the usefulness. Usefulness is obviously...er...useful. Silliness is good, too...and necessary to avoid madness, imnsho (admittedly, I get a kick out of the "growing things/hatching things" apps). No doubt it has put me in touch with old friends I had *long* ago lost touch with and have greatly enjoyed finding them again...it has even directly led to several books sales. Fun had by all...

I have just discovered, however, the first app that is interesting enough to justify mucking about with FB by itself. It is called Nexus and it creates "connection" graphs that illustrate how those you know are connected to eachother and the relative strength of those connections (it appears that Nexus looks at schools, work, activities, organizations, etc in compiling its charts).

For example, the wee pentagram at the right is a group of highschool friend, one of the two point groups are two friend from law school and the other is a husband and wife. The large structure allows me to trace the connections that link Terry at the Rare Books School to Adrienne (Silicon Valley design, brand, interface wonk) to Lawrence Lessig (IP lawyer, founder of Creative Commons and tech wonk). Equally interesting are the outliers...those I know who don't seem to be connected to others. See Adrienne's for a much more complex graph...she has more friends *g*.

Above and beyond the first-blush fun of looking at what connections exist between those you know, the real strength of the app comes in allowing you to think about (visually, in a way) who among your friends *should* know eachother and how you might make certain introductions and connections. I think, with some applied brain time, this app could actually be a very useful and interesting tool. I would like to suggest that they think about approaching LinkedIn and licencing the code. Very, very cool.