Friendster and relationship networks

Jun 23 04:50 UTC 2003

Okay, so I signed up with Friendster a while back.  Lynne and Aaron were
the ones who got me into it.

As of now, I'm directly connected to nine friends, and I'm directly or
indirectly connected to a total of 12,179 people.  And so are you, if
you're connected to Lynne or Aaron or any of their friends or friends-
of-friends.

The toplogy of this is somewhat interesting.  I mean, it's easy to imagine
how a cluster of a few people, like the handful of local Grexers and sf
community folks who got me into this, could gradually spread out around
the edges.  This kind of growth would be experienced as a gain of a small
percentage of new contacts each few days or week, say. Along the way, an
expanding network is going to collide with other similarly expanding
networks and automatically merge.  From any individual's perspective, this
would be a sudden upsurge, like a doubling of the size of one's network
overnight.

A single individual who happens to know two people who belong to different
clusters can singlehandedly merge those clusters, at least in a
mathematical sense.  But if there are two large and tightly interconnected
clusters connected by a single individual, their status as a "one single" 
network is very tenuous.  If that one account gets deleted, does that
separate the two clusters, causing all their members to see their network
size drop in half?

I think about these issues because my web site has a somewhat analogous
problem: political families.  Thousands of the politicians in my database
are connected by blood, marriage, or adoption.  Every cluster of three or
more is listed here: http://politicalgraveyard.com/families/index.html
(there are 410 clusters; the largest one has 130 members).

The clusters are determined (and even named) automatically: the program,
in effect, follows each link and connects up everyone it finds into one
"family".  By this logic, Mario Cuomo is listed on the Kennedy family
page, because his son married RFK's daughter.

I do include a disclaimer that says: "Some families traditionally (and
perhaps properly) considered separately are joined together here if linked
by marriage or otherwise." 

The largest cluster, Livingston-Harrison-Lee, includes such folks as
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, James Madison, John
Marshall, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, and Jefferson Davis -- I
guess it illustrates what a small world was the aristocracy of early
America.

But I'm not really interested in seeing the big clusters merge with each
other, likely as that is as I accumulate more data.  Who really wants to
plow through an inventory of thousands of people in one enormous cluster?

response 4 of 70:

Jun 23 15:12 UTC 2003

Don't ask.

response 6 of 70:

Jun 23 15:28 UTC 2003

It's a six-degrees-of-separation type website.  And it always seemed like
the bad-idea factor outweighed the possibly-fun factor.

response 8 of 70:

Jun 23 20:43 UTC 2003

I think it is kind of fun. It is fun to see who knows whom and such. 
What really interests me is how I am sometimes connected to people by 
multiple, seemingly unrelated, paths. It is kind of cool. 

response 10 of 70:

Jun 24 17:17 UTC 2003

I'm on it, but only just recently -- (carson) exerted peer pressure upon me.

response 12 of 70:

Jun 25 18:08 UTC 2003

My email has been out in public for so long, and in so many places, that
it would be silly to try to hide it now.  I do get 2,000-some spam per
month (not even counting the Nigerian frauds), but I have a spam filter
to sort it out for me.

I have noticed that Friendster won't let you visit the profile pages of
people more than about 4 links away.  Does that mean that 12,000-some
individuals are within four links of me?  Hard to believe...

response 14 of 70:

Jun 26 01:36 UTC 2003

I agree fully.

response 18 of 70:

Jul 10 20:12 UTC 2003

hmm.  It seems like Erdos should get a mention here. . . .

response 20 of 70:

Jul 10 20:23 UTC 2003

I did notice that God was in my network but I figured if God wanted to 
be my friend, he would ask me so I never bothered to ask him to be his 
friend ;)

response 22 of 70:

Jul 10 21:01 UTC 2003

Actually, there are a few Friendster-type sites out there for mathematicians,
including at least one for finding Erdos numbers.  My uncle is a
mathematician, and he sends us links to this sort of thing from time to time.
Try http://www.acs.oakland.edu/~grossman/erdoshp.html

response 24 of 70:

Jul 11 04:04 UTC 2003

I assume mine is a sideways figure eight.

(I've never published a paper, much less collaborated on one.)