Martin’s ITP Blog: entry

friendSwarm is an iphone application for generative social network mapping. The aim of the application is to provide a glimpse into the depth of social network data, and provide a spatial-context with which to navigate and the explore the network. The application uses facebook connect to gather the user’s social network data and visualize it as a series of interconnected physics-based nodes and tags.

The network starts as un unshaped blob, but over time the elements wiggle into clusters based on friend connections and tags:

And over time, the network calms down into an optimized form. The red tags indicate tag clusters, whose size depend on the member’s count and the closeness of their locations.

Different shapes of friend clusters indicate various degrees of inter-connectedness or separation.