Circos - visualizing the genome uses a circular composition of ideograms to mitigate the fact that some data, like combinations of intra- and inter-chromosomal relationships (alignments, duplications, assembly paired-ends, etc) are very difficult to organize when the underlying ideograms (or contigs) are arranged as lines.
Friend Wheel is a Facebook Application, developed by Thomas Fletcher, which takes all of your friends, then links and groups them together to form a nice, colorful, interesting image.
Each node represents one of your Facebook friends. If two friends are linked by a line, it means that they are friends with each other.
There’s also an interactive flash version which allows the nodes to be moved and highlighted, and makes it possible to zoom in and out.
If you have a Facebook account, you can get your own Friend Wheel showing how your own friends link together.
I find this to be the most interesting way to look at my Facebook friends list. My personal friends list tends to be quite segmented, I see a large connection group of my web designer (and fantasy football) friends, then there’s the Flash community, then a group of family members (11), then high school friends, current friends, and a large group of non-connected friends.
Compare mine to Keith Peters’ (who recently blogged about this) Friend Wheel. Being who he is (Flash God and all), his friends tend to be very well connected as they are typically people in the Flash community.
The wheel is beautiful as a static graphic, but it’s taken a step further as you are able to view the interactive version, which allows you to zoom in and out and drag names from the circle to better see individual connections.
The generation screen give the user many options to customize colors, compare to other friends lists, and sorting, the graphs shown here are sorted by the default “grouping”, but I just tried alphabetically and it’s quite interesting as well.
Now I just wish I could turn it into a globe and spin it around…
