Friend Wheel

April 2, 2008

Friend Wheel-1

This neat little drawing is called a Friend Wheel. It’s one of the applications you can add to your Facebook page. Vanessa told me about it over the weekend, and so of course I signed up for it. According to the data supplied with the drawing, it contains an amazing 375 “nodes” and 3054 links. Each of those “nodes” actually represents a Facebook friend. And those “links” are connections between various people who are friends with each other. In the original version my name shows up in gray type in the middle of the wheel. If you used a magnifying glass, you could spot the names of 375 of my closest friends, with the proviso that I don’t know who some of them are. That happens because I tend to hit the Yes button anytime I get a friend request. Why not? Just because I don’t know them doesn’t mean they don’t know me. So I can’t say definitively that I can identify every single person on this list, but it’s fair to say that I know most of them.

If you study the Friend Wheel, you can learn something about the connections of your life. The application groups names together by the number of shared connections. If I look at my own Friend Wheel, I can see a heavy concentration of related people in the lower right-hand section. There is a smaller concentration in the lower left-hand section. Then there are a ton of lines crossing from one side to the other. The lower right-hand section represents the Word of Life connection. A lot of those names are present or former students at the Bible Institute where I teach every year. You can see how tightly they connect to each other. The lower left-hand section represents the Chicago connection. Many of those are folks from Moody and Calvary. In the upper right-hand section are many names with no lines coming from them. That either means we don’t have any Facebook friends in common, or it might mean they aren’t as free and easy as I am about approving Facebook friends. Although Facebook started a few years ago as a social networking site for college students, it has now been opened to all ages and backgrounds (it still skews much younger than the general population). So you can’t make too many generalizations because I don’t think Cliff Raad (who is 84) has a Facebook page (though he should).

Do you have any thoughts or questions about this post?