brown2020

Social Media is a Conversation: Visualization of Interactions on Facebook

In The Lord of the Rings, a palantír stone was like a crystal ball. When you looked into the stone, you could see what was happening near other palantíri around the world. If you could learn to manipulate the stones, you could gain great power by using the stones not only to see the physical world, but also to peer into the history, the thoughts, and the intentions of other people around the world.

Palantír is an apt name for a new project from Facebook that might allow us for the first time to glimpse the world from Facebook’s point of view. Palantír is a visualization of the data flowing through and collected by Facebook: Conversations, comments, photos, friend requests, pokes, status updates, and more.

Each action is represented by a light particle or an icon that floats into the atmosphere from its point of origin on the earth. Conversations and interactions between people become three dimensional splines of light or comets traversing the globe connecting the locations of the participants. These are the artifacts of the social interaction of 120 million of earth’s citizens. It is a stunning display of our interconnectedness, a heatmap of human interaction on the network.

Mark Zuckerberg first launched the website that would become Facebook on February 4th, 2004. It was only for Harvard students, to help people get to know each other. It clearly found a need: Half of the student body signed up in the first two weeks. Chris Hughes and Duston Moskovitz joined Mark to work on the site. Four months later, Facebook had added 30 more college networks. That summer, Facebook moved to Palo Alto, joined forces with the cofounder of Napster, Sean Parker, raised $500,000 from the cofounder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, and never left.

Four years later, Facebook is the 4th most trafficked website in the world, and counts 85% of American college students as members. Barely out of college himself, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes would help change the world again as Director of Online Organizing for Barack Obama, proving the power of social media to motivate and mobilize people to action.

Facebook has become the number one place on the web to share photos, hosting more than 10 billion photos already, and adding another 30 million new photos every day. In addition to photos, users are sharing everything from what they are doing right now to the latest news, thoughts, ideas, opinions, events, music, books, movies, and more. It is hard to comprehend so much data. Facebook engineers Jack Lindamood, Kevin Der, and Dan Weatherford created Palantir to help us visualize it.

Facebook is considering releasing the Palantír to the public as a feature, so that Facebook users everwhere can look into the crystal ball of Facebook data and see how the world is buzzing with interconnectedness and conversation. This is just a tiny glimpse, however, of the stunning view of the world that must be possible from inside the walls of Facebook.