A Facebook engineer mapped Facebook's massive social graph by weighting cities according to the number of friendships within and between them, producing this jewel of a visualization.
What's fascinating about this, apart from its beauty, is that depending on what you know about a country's politics, technological development and popular tech trends, the map implies or confirms different things for different countries.
China is a big black hole most likely thanks to the Great Firewal. North Africa i mostly dark due to lower population density and developing communication infrastructure, except for the expected hot spots like South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and (I think, it's hard to tell) Senegal.
Russia an Brazil nearly don't exist according to this map, but that's likely due to other social networks being more popular there. Probably Vkontakte and Orkut, respectively. Curiously India, also a big user of Orkut, is also very intense on the Facebook map, possibly suggesting they're comfortable maintaining several social networks.
Further, the relationships are fascinating. It's no surprise that Hawaiïans have more connections with the mainland US than with the Asian Pacific Rim, but I was surprised Australia and New Zealand have a stronger connection with south-east Asia than with Europe. Partly due to their colonial history, and Oz's inclusion in the Commonwealth, but also because those countries are tremendously popular retirement and emigration destinations for northern Europeans.
Most interesting, though, is the view this map gives of the relative prominence, at least on Facebook, of nations regardless of their size. Look to the right of Africa's lower tip; the two tiny dots of Reunion and Mauritius are tighly bound by a glowing cord of intense social connectivity, while the lower population density of Madagascar reveals itself as a loose web between the major cities.
And then there are the little geographic mysteries. For instance: what's that little hotspot east of Turkey, northwest of Tehran? It's too far to the east to be T'bilisi; it has intense, short-distance connections mostly toward the west, so it's almost certainly very near the Caspian coast, but what could it be?
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