Work can be a funny thing. The best things I do aren’t always the things that I’m meant to be doing. I’m lucky to work with some very cool, but also extremely smart people. All of them tend to have little side projects that they’re tinkering away with over lunch, in the evenings or early in the morning before anyone else gets in.

Working on some customer projects over the last few years I’ve had to build a few social network applications. The most interesting (and hardest) part of them is usually the visualisation of the networks. The problem with the standard node and connector graphs that you tend to see is that they quickly get too complicated and loose their meaning to people. So, as a little side project I wrote a visualisation to renders a user’s IBM social network. The internal corporate blog system provided the data, a small web app aggregated the blog feeds (looking at people who were commenting on each other’s posts among other things).

I then put together a fairly simple Flash client that read the data, loaded a contact’s photos from our directory server and then scaled the images depending on the strength of the connection between the user and their contact. So, when someone looks at their social network, the larger the image, the stronger the connection is to them. It seems to work and it’s kind of nice just to be able to see the pictures of your contacts in one place.

There’s a bit more about the project here.

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