Software for Social Networking Diagrams?

jonerik writes "A friend of mine who is attempting to create three-dimensional computer models of social networks is looking for software that can do the job; in her words, 'the computer version of a tinker toy set.' She'd prefer software for the Mac, however she has access to PCs so MS-based software would be okay, too. Anyone have any thoughts on the subject?" Think about molecular modelling, where each "atom" is either an agency or an individual and the "bond" is the connection between the two.

"More specifically, here's what she'd like it to be:

• easy to learn for someone without graphics background- 'I can NOT make a career out of learning it.'
• something like a molecular model of social networks where each node represents an agency and can have many different types of connections. It should at least be able to handle something on the order of 250 interconnected nodes.
• able to edit the model on the fly - adding information as I learn about connections.
• able to rotate the model, enlarge sections to view detail, and maybe somehow attach descriptions to the nodes and connections (so one can identify a connection with a particular agency role or individual)."

Comments

Pajek

[romanm]

Your friend can try Pajek, a package for large network analysis for Win32, developed at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Or you may want to search the Net for other Graph Drawing Competition contestants.

the sexchart

[Phork]

the sex chart is a 2d rendering of 1500 iinterconnected nodes. I belive they have a utility that gets fed a textfile describing the node relationships, and from that reners the text. This might be usefull to you.