Facebook: Mapping the World’s Friendships
Visualizing the interconnectedness of Facebook users
This project visualized the degree of interconnectedness between Facebook’s hundreds of millions of members as part of Facebook’s Stories initiative. Countries are sorted by a combination of how many Facebook friendships there are between countries and the total number of Facebook friendships there are in that country.
Turns out this number can tell you some pretty interesting things about not just where a country is now, but where it’s been. The Marshall Islands shows strong results in the immediate geographic area—Guam, the Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji—but the number one result is to the United States, over 4,600 miles away, since the islands were occupied by the United States until 1986.