The Politics of Systems

Pages are part of Facebook’s project to suck up the Web. They are also full of data. In the next version of netvizz I will add a feature that allows to dig into that data a little bit. Here is a preview:

This network (visualized with gephi) shows interactions on the Facebook page of the Guardian. I extracted all the likes and comments for the last 80 posts. On the whole, there are 9.500 users liking and commenting away. Each dark and labeled node is a post while all the others are users. A heat scale (blue => yellow => red) shows how often a user interacts with the page; size shows how often a node was liked or commented on (for pages) or liked and commented (for users).

One can see a a core of regulars in the middle of the graph, but the main engagement comes from a large majority of users that have only interacted with a single posts. These users drag the big subjects out to the margins in this specific spatialization. Engagement, here, comes from a fleeting audience rather than a more stable group or community.

There is still some testing to do, but I hope to get this feature ready soon for general use.

Post filed under facebook, softwareproject, visualization.