AIM Meets Social Network Theory

dan moore writes "A student at Caltech has created a website (BuddyZoo.com) that tracks cliques within groups of peoples' buddylists. It also measures buddy popularity and allows you to do a six-degrees type search for other screen names. An interesting approach to social network theory."

Comments

Gorgeous but Unscientific and Ill-documented

[billstewart]

First of all, it's an absolutely gorgeous graphical website. But there's no documentation on

• what it's really doing,
• or how it really works,
• or what it can tell you other than letting you browse through the pretty pictures, like get a summary of clique statistics, or looking up specific names
• or whether the user interface will scale if a few hundred thousand people check in to it.

Also, if it's depending on people to enter their own data, rather than having some efficient way to siphon up all the data directly (which would be a major security/privacy risk of its own if it were possible), then it's really not scientific, and the statistics won't be meaningful, just anecdotal. And if it does get a countable fraction of AOL users, it'll get AOLdotted pretty quickly.

I made the site

[SkyIce]

A couple of things

I don't have the data already. Users contribute their lists to the site by uploading them.

I'm not going to spam people. I promise.

This load makes me glad I put the time into setting up mod_perl

proof that I made the site:
http://www.buddyzoo.com/images/slashdot.htm l

Re:I made the site

[SkyIce]

One more thing: Nobody who does not have you on their buddy list will ever see your screen name as a result of the site. Spam address-harvesters will never see screennames that they don't provide.

Right now smarterchild is topping the popularity rankings.

Don't click the link!

[shadwwulf]

The link in the parent post is a goatse.cx wannabe.

Be careful...8')

Six degrees of separation

[arvindn]

A famous experiment conducted 35 years ago contended that anyone can reach anyone else in the world through a chain of friends of length 6. Some people are trying to find out if this is really the case.

BTW, I wonder how online relationships will compare with real world relationships? One tends to have more acquaintances in meatspace, but our online friends are more diverse.

Re:The results seem bizarre.

[SkyIce]

I scrambled them for privacy reasons.

Re:wow

[dorward]

Oi! I'm running Gaim!

(Instructions are provided for converting gaim buddy lists to the format needed by the system, but it took me a couple of minutes to figure out the syntax, so here it is):

perl gaim2blt.pl -s YourScreenName ~/.gaim/YourScreenName.0.blist > gaim.buddy