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April 27, 2004
Geo-mapping Orkut
Posted by Clay Shirky
Here's my geo-map of Orkut. Red lines are friends, blue are friends of friends:
Pretty much what you'd expect -- white-hot in NYC and the Valley, random smatterings in SoCal and Texas, and the occasional odd point (CMU, RIT, etc.) Fill in your Orkut name or number in the form field at the top of that page to get yours (and note that they don't ask for a password, meaning they're using cached data.)
ObInfoVizRant: This is a classic "Oooh cool" followed by "Vanishes without a trace"
toyinterface choice, in part because it's designed for maximum "Keanu Reeves" interfaceness, even though it actually damages the sense of the data being portrayed. As an artifact of the choice to use lines instead of points to represent distribution, there's a ton of information over the Midwest, even though I know no one there.
UPDATE: Liz rightly upbraids me in the comments for not differentiating between the Lines and No Lines interfaces, which are an option for the user. I should have said "The _default_ graph would be much better done as a set of icons showing individuals, so that density was in clusters, instead of line intersections." You can get this graph by clicking No Lines, but the designer clearly chose lines as the default for the coolness factor.
Comments (8)
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1. Liz Lawley on April 27, 2004 3:23 PM writes...
Um...there's a radio button on the page that lets you toggle between "lines" and "no lines"--the "no lines" version shows you points and clusters.
Permalink to Comment2. Ben Hyde on April 27, 2004 6:31 PM writes...
Oh man do I feel your pain!
I've yet to see a reasonable solution to the display of power-law distributed populations. They always leave the impression that the cities are tiny and while suggesting that the rural areas are more worthy than they really are. It's an amazingly hard ink distribution problem.
For example even this drawing which manages to try very hard to get it right still breaksdown when it gets into the densely populated regions:
http://130.166.124.2/boston/bos1.GIF
I find this very frustrating because if you can't show a picture of this stuff how can you hope for people to get a feel for it.
Permalink to Comment3. Lindon Parker on April 27, 2004 8:19 PM writes...
This is (sadly) just one more example of USA-centric design. My "map" shows up empty - what a shock. I wonder how many Europeans, Asian, Australasians(hey that's me!), Africans etc. are using Orkut?
I know it's a little thing but hey each little thing adds up (death by a thousand cuts).
I guess we learn that cultural-myopic behaviour isn't excluded from the on-line world (tying to stay on-topic here...)
Permalink to Comment4. James Farmer on April 28, 2004 6:59 AM writes...
Us down under just don't have it fair do we ;o)
Permalink to Comment5. Rolan on April 28, 2004 5:03 PM writes...
The lines are used to show network connections. They help the observer visualize who is being linked. Also, without the lines, it is easy for the eyes to miss a link in rural areas where there may only be 1 friend (a single red pixel is easy to overlook).
What the map here shows.. is that even though one can be connected to hundreds of people through 2 degrees of separation, those "friends" are more often than not, all geographically clustered in only a few locations. I'm sure there are some useful applications for this (tracking fugitives, maybe?)
The data is a snapshot of Orkut users from Mar 1.
The reason the map is US only is due to the lack of an available public GPS coordinate database for non-US countries. Also, Orkut profiles do not specify City/State/Province location information for users outside of the US.
If anyone can point me to a international database of GPS coordinates, please email me. Thanks.
Permalink to Comment6. Rolan Yang on April 28, 2004 5:03 PM writes...
The lines are used to show network connections. They help the observer visualize who is being linked. Also, without the lines, it is easy for the eyes to miss a link in rural areas where there may only be 1 friend (a single red pixel is easy to overlook).
What the map here shows.. is that even though one can be connected to hundreds of people through 2 degrees of separation, those "friends" are more often than not, all geographically clustered in only a few locations. I'm sure there are some useful applications for this (tracking fugitives, maybe?)
The data is a snapshot of Orkut users from Mar 1.
The reason the map is US only is due to the lack of an available public GPS coordinate database for non-US countries. Also, Orkut profiles do not specify City/State/Province location information for users outside of the US.
If anyone can point me to a international database of GPS coordinates, please email me. Thanks.
Permalink to Comment7. Clay Shirky on April 29, 2004 12:57 PM writes...
I understand what the lines are _for_. My point is that they don't work.
The lines elide two different sorts of distance -- social and physical -- into a single interface in a way that destroys information rather than enhancing it. There are people in my Orkut list that I am physically near and socially far from, and vice-versa. Making the default map of social connections an actual map _looks_ cool, but is counter-productive to any real understanding of the network it represents.
Permalink to Comment8. Rolan Yang on April 29, 2004 4:08 PM writes...
True, the lines do not represent the qualitative information accurately. There was never a claim that they did so. I guess one could consider the map an "overview" of a member's social network, as a "thumbprint" is to a photographic image.
Perhaps if we added a third dimension to the map, we could cram more information into the same space. I'm visualizing a multi-framed animated image, perhaps one where the viewer could scroll through the different "slices" which represent the strenghts of the social vs physical network. Much like a CAT scan visualization I did of myself a while back..
http://www.datawhorehouse.com/cat/
(IE browser for best compatibility)
Can I skirt all this technical criticism by calling the Orkut Mapper, instead, a work of art? ;)
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