j’s scratchpad

When I was playing in Orkut, Google’s social networking tool, this evening, I was pleased to find some features around their friends portion of the site I hadn’t noticed before. You can view a geographic map with friends icons on it and mutual friends in much more obvious ways than what I remember from before. I seem to remember the friends network. I play in Orkut occasionally, but it’s been a while since I’ve scrutinized the friends section of a profile.

They still don’t have a graphical representation of what I would really like to see: a map between friends’ networks. I know my entire network contains many people who are connected to each other. I want something that shows me graphically the common areas where our networks intersect within 1-3 friends.

Forgive me for using real world examples to illustrate, but I’ve named these people before and some of you know about our real world connections anyway, so I don’t think I’m revealing any secrets here.

So let’s say v (not the dancer), Garrett, Erica, sj, and I are all on Orkut somewhere. (We aren’t, but we can pretend, right?)

me <–> Erica
Erica <–> v
me <–> Garrett
Garrett <–> v
Garrett <–> Erica
me <–> sj
v <–> sj

Right now, Orkut will tell me Garrett and I have Erica as a mutual friend and Erica and I have Garrett as a mutual friend. I want it to tell me Garrett, Erica, and sj have v as a common friend. Maybe v is someone I also know or should know based on common contacts. That’s an example of networks that are 1 friend removed, intersect within 1 friend, something like that.

Thinking about the real life connections between many of my friends makes my head swim sometimes. It makes me think of tangled yarn. Lots of tangled, intermingled yarn coming from different balls and skeins. Or pasta.

I have a feeling that seeing maps like this would reveal to me quite a few people who are on Orkut whom I don’t realize are presently on Orkut, as well as revealing a number of common contacts. We often play the six degrees of sj and often, there’s a connection within 3 or 4. Scary. (Oh, um, sj, did you know that we do that?) Who wants to dig through someone’s contact list that numbers 100+ to find one person in common? Who has the time to search for the names of everyone s/he knows or meets?

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 8:15 pm and is filed under Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.