There’s a lot of things you can do with data sets.  Paul Butler, an intern with Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering team, wanted to play with the information Facebook collects on their 500 million users around the world.  Butler wanted to see just how people connect with one another.  In an attempt to visualize where people live in comparison to their Facebook friends, he started plotting points.  The result is a beautifully detailed map of cities connecting to Facebook friends.

Who knew visualizing data could be so beautiful?  That’s an incredible image, isn’t it?  So pretty, the way everything lights up.  The details are so stunning, it made me post the map despite my Face-related Facebook burnout.

“The blob had turned into a surprisingly detailed map of the world.  Not only were continents visible, certain international borders were apparent as well.  What really struck me, though, was knowing that the lines didn’t represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships.  Each line might represent a friendship made while traveling, a family member abroad, or an old college friend pulled away by the various forces of life,” said Butler, the Facebook intern who constructed the map, in a blog post.

Tags: unusual images, maps, connection map, Facebook, Paul Butler, Facebook connections map, beautiful images, global Facebook connection map, unusual maps, beautiful images, Facebook people connection map, Facebook data mapped

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