Friendship map of the world

I've always been a fan of finding interesting ways of mashing up data from the internet. One project I did was downloading performance ratings of CPUs and combining them with pricing data to calculate price/performance ratios before selecting a part.

Recently, an intern at facebook stripped out friendship data from their servers and made a map of connections between cities, by mapping what city they were from into geological coordinates and drawing lines between the points. After some artistic manipulations of the lines, his work resulted in this.


A very cool map indeed. Some interesting notable dark spots are South America, Russia, Mongolia and China, parts of Japan and along the Canadian and US border. If you're interested in the details of this map, a link to the original facebook article is available here.