Graphviz is a set of free software from AT&T labs for drawing any kind of graph. I used one of its utilities called neato to draw the following graphs:
(click for the full-size image)
This graph only shows around 700 connections, based on only 40 people closest to me, and it omits a few leaves (people with only 1 friend). There's a lot of good things about this graph, but also lots of problems.
Some problems:
-
Overlap. Lots of it. Some overlap, in the dense thickets,
seems unavoidable, but there are small branches that could easily be placed
to not overlap, yet they aren't. There's a neato option
to space out the nodes so that don't overlap, but that produces a really big
graph - and the edges still overlap:
- It's static. A graph of this kind really needs to be dynamic and interactive. In fact, it's quite far from interactive, as neato took several minutes to generate this image, although can be tuned down to a couple seconds by drawing less detail.
It's time to consider where this could go...