New Social-Network Mapping Tools Compared

Roland Piquepaille writes "There are many new visualization tools around us which try to map our social networks. In this column, I examined Inflow, a datamining tool digging through your email repository to discover and find trends to know more about your networks. Here is a quote: "Assuming you have a significant amount of e-mail traffic, the software will create a remarkably sophisticated assessment of your various social groups, showing you not only their relative size but also the interactions between different groups." I also peeked at TouchGraph GoogleBrowser, which uses Amazon or Google Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to visually describe how books and Web sites connect with one another. Finally, I took a look at a brand new way of visualizing Google search results, from anacubis. If you know about other similar new tools, please tell me and I'll gather your comments in a future story."

Comments

Dr. Dobbs article about this

[ayf6]

In a recent (i believe 2 months ago) Dr. Dobbs there was an article about just this type of application. There was an article written by one of the top social enginners of applications like this. He was one of the people responsible for doing the Amazon "like this you'd like that" feature.

Network mapping via Google

[gmuslera]

I think Kartoo also give a graphical view of search results, but I don't know if it do the kind of mapping or relationship that do the TouchGraph GoogleBrowser or anacubis.

Anyway, this seems to be a next step in the evolution of search engines, not giving URLs that matches queries, but relating them, showing the relationship between actual data and ubication in internet.

Re:Free software equivalent to InFlow?

[juuri]

It isn't quite the same but with a little scripting on your end you can make some pretty detailed stats of all your mail using "mls".

Re:Free software equivalent to InFlow?

[joshua42]

I had never heard about that piece of software before either, but it is really not terribly difficult to read up on the subject.

http://marki.host.sk/MLS/

Non Obvious Relational awareness

[ralphus]

Anyone at Blackhat last year and happen to see the presentation at lunch on Non Obvious Relational Awareness?

This was a truly scary demonstration of this kind of technology being used by private industry, namely casinos, to track relationships between people.

Real stream available at: rtsp://media-1.datamerica.com/blackhat/bh-usa-02/v ideo/BH-USA-02-JEFF-JONAS.rm

A few factual errors in original blog entry

[orgnet]

Thank you Roland for the write-up on InFlow on your weblog!

Unfortunately there are some errors...
1) I am not a former IBM'er... they were my first major client.
2) It did not take me 15 years to write the software... the first working version [w/o visuals] was written in 2 weekends in 1987... on a 512K Macintosh... using Prolog. Yes, now it is commercial, used mostly by management consultants, on Windows. I also use it with VPC6 on my Powerbook.
3) InFlow can process data from email traffic to find patterns and paths, but the paragraph you quote is about the OTHER product in the article -- MIT Media Lab's "Social Network Fragments" -- a very cool tool.

Looking at just your own email[in/out] will not tell you much [except that it is 40% spam]. You need to look at the email flows between project team members, co-workers, communities of interest, etc. At least 20 participants before interesting patterns emerge...

Most of our data is collected via on-line surveys -- people participate knowingly. Most survey participants are very eager to see the resulting maps -- they want to see where they, and their friends ended up.

Valdis