FACEBOOK MAP OF THE WORLD - VISUALISING THE SOCIAL GRAPH

Here are some great data visualizations from a Facebook intern in its data infrastructure engineering team, showing a map of social connections through Facebook. For the first time, a full map of the social graph. Paul Butler, had access to Facebook's Apache Hive database and its 500m records, and through a series of carefully constructed steps was able to create this. More details on how he did it here.

The images remind me of some of Aaron Koblin's work on flight patterns.





















This work reconfirms the fact that the social graph follows economic, political, and cultural ties. The English speaking world links together (e.g. UK, and North America), Portugal and Spain link through to South America, China doesn't have Facebook, so its dark, and most of Africa is unfortunately dark, except the big population centers.

Understanding the social graph and then learning how to use it is one of digital's biggest challenges.

DELL SOCIAL MEDIA LISTENING CENTRE

Dell launch a social media listening centre.

GOOGLE ZEITGEIST VIDEO 2010: YEAR IN REVIEW

Very cool video from Google looking at the past year through the way we've searched.

HANS ROSLING'S 200 COUNTRIES, 200 YEARS, 4 MINUTES

Hans Rosling is always a pleasure to watch, and the way he tells stories through data is always fascinating.

BEST DIGITAL OF THE DECADE

The One Club invited top digital creatives to determine which work from the last Digital Decade (2000-2010) were the best. See below, or click through to One Club to get some more of the backstory.

Number 10 - Dove Evolution (Ogilvy for Dove, 2007)

Number 9 - HBO Voyeur (BBDO for HBO, 2008)

Number 8 - Fiat Eco:Drive (AKQA for Fiat, 2009)

Number 7 - Dream Kitchens (Forsman and Bodenfors for IKEA, 2006)

Number 6 - Chalkbot (Wieden & Kennedy for Live Strong Foundation, 2010)

Number 5 - Whopper Sacrifice (Crispin Porter + Bogusky for Burger King, 2009)

Number 4 - Uniqlock (Projecttor for Uniqlo, 2008)

Number 3 - Nike+ (R/GA for Nike, 2007)

Number 2 - The Hire (Fallon for BMW, 2002/3)

Number 1 - Subservient Chicken (Crispin Porter + Bogusky for Burger King, 2005)

FACEBOOK PAGEVIEWS ARE 25% OF US PAGEVIEWS

According to Hitwise, nearly 1 in 4 page views in the US took place on Facebook.com for the week ending November 13, 2010. The market share of page views for Facebook was 24.27% last week, 3.8x the volume of the 2nd ranked website YouTube with 6.39%. This is s big jump from just March when the figure was 1/10 page views or 10.28%.

That growth is pretty phenomenal, and looks set to continue.

In addition to the page views on Facebook.com, there are also the users of Facebook off of the main site, in functions like Facebook Open Graph. Many people have Facebook interactions on third-party sites.

The viral loop created by Facebook is so hugely infectious it's taking over the whole web, and the brutal efficiency Facebook have applied to ensuring that growth continues is testament to their management strength. Its gone wrong for many other networks much earlier than this.

When Facebook reaches 1bn users - which I reckon will happen towards mid-2012 - then strange things will start to happen to the rest of the web, and web giants like Google will need to adjust to a new reality.