Vizster: Visualizing Online Social Networks

Authors: Jeffrey Heer and Danah Boyd

Presented by:Jeanne Kramer-Smyth

Machon Gregory

Goals for Vizster

• Fun

• New way to visualize and explore social networks

Social Networking Sites

1993 2007

Identity Groups of FriendsterEarly Adoptors

• Gay men

• Techies/bloggers

• “Burners” (those who attend Burning Man)

More About Friendster

• Originally meant to be a dating site

• People joined because their friends joined

• “Fakesters” – fake profiles created to connect people with shared interests

• Competition to collect as many people as possible in order to be on the ‘first page’ of friend lists

Vizster Overview

• Ego-centric graph view of a social network

• Allows for data exploration

• Search, Connections, Clustering, X-ray View

• Animated force directed layout– Barnes-Hut Algorithm

• Linkage based clustering algorithm– Newman's Community Identification Algorithm

Mechanics with Pictures

• Connected people move closer together• Large groups of connected people push

away other large groups of people• People with few connections are pulled in

to ‘orbit’ large groups of people

Demo Video

Initial View

• Egocentric• Not full overview –

only shows those people connected to central person

• Includes connections between all users displayed.

Search

• Highlights people matching search criteria

• Greys out all other displayed people

Show Connections

• Permits users to find out how two displayed users are connected

• Will add connecting users to display

• Not obvious in interface – but useful once explained.

Clusters Create Communities

• Clustering logic based on linkages creates community displays

• Slide bar permits users to step through the phases of grouping to find what ‘looks right’ – supports subjective view of groups

X-Ray View

• Users select attribute to display (such as gender or number of connections)

• Removing photos and other visual cues supports seeing patterns of selected attribute

X-Ray View + Search

• Powerful combination

• Still greys out those people who do not fit the search criteria

• Still color codes results based on selected x-ray attribute

Underlying Technologies

• Prefuse is an extensible framework written

in Java designed to create interactive

information visualization tools

– Vizster, Namesearcher, Social Action

• Lucene is a search engine API

– Wikipedia, Beagle, CNet

Evaluation of Vizster

• Social observation – 500 person party in San Francisco

• Individual observation in lab setting

Questions?