Global Facebook Friendships

In: Graphic Design (bad) Interactive Internet/tech Maps

11 Sep 2012

Ok, maybe I’m just in a bad mood because I’m back at work after a nice long vacation – but I think this visualization sucks. All it does is ordinally identify the top five linked countries for each country. There is no scale. What does the bubble size indicate? No matter what country you click on, the top five all grow to about the same size. Is the 4th relationship really almost as strong as the 2nd? Who knows? The methodology states “Rankings between countries are based on the number of Facebook friendships between countries and the total number of Facebook friendships within each country.” Ummm… how, exactly? Is it a ratio? Is the total number used as a weight?  Thankfully they color coded it based on the continents – because everyone has trouble identifying those, right? Oh, and Seychelles will be happy to know it’s now in Asia. Totally useless.

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