These images are from an experimental application for visualizing your friends on Facebook and their interconnections. Facebook allows applications to check whether one friend is friends with another friend. So I use this data to produce a chart that begins simply with you connected to each of your friends, and evolves as friends are connected with each other. Although the placement of people is initially arbitrary and random, the links between people tend to organize groups with multiple interconnections.
You can try it for yourself if you have a Facebook account. After loading the page, you should be redirected to Facebook to login and give permission to the application to find your friends. When you return to the application, it should begin drawing you and your immediate network. If it seems to stop without finding all of the connections, try pressing 'r'. To save a screenshot of the visualization, press 's'. You can drag people to add some organize to the layout.
The more friends you have, the slower it takes. If you have more than a few hundred, it'll get pretty crowded.
This is a Flash application that uses the Flare data visualization library. The friend relationships are modeled as a tree pattern and then presented using Flare's ForceDirectedLayout which subjects the data nodes to iterations of a physics simulation where nodes repel each other and the edges connecting them act as springs.
