I’m taking a Social Network Analysis class on Coursera. These weren’t assignments for the class (well, the Facebook one sort of was), just some experiments I wanted to share.

Facebook

You can use netvizz to download a gdf file of your Facebook network, i.e., all of your Facebook friends and all of the connections between them.

You can then use your favorite graph analysis software (I used Gephi, which is open-source and free) to look for patterns.

My Facebook network is in the image below. Of the four main clusters, two consist of co-workers, one is family and one is people I know from roller hockey.

Click image to enlarge

Twitter

This is the network of people I follow on Twitter. I used NodeXL (a free, open-source template for Excel) to download and lay out the data.

Click image to enlarge

I labeled the nodes in this one. With a few exceptions, the light blue nodes are people I follow because I think they’re funny, the light green nodes are related to sports and/or USC, the dark green nodes are people of professional interest, the red nodes are former colleagues, and the dark blue nodes are everyone else.

The size of the node indicates number of tweets, i.e., larger nodes tweet more than smaller nodes.

LinkedIn

My LinkedIn network is a little bigger than my Facebook or Twitter. The green, yellow, blue, purple and orange clusters are co-workers and recruiters. The gray nodes at the top are people with whom I share one or more professional interests. You can see that they split out into multiple sub-groups.

Click image to enlarge

I used the LinkedIn Maps application to generate the graphic.

Summary

These are small-world networks and I had a good idea in advance about who was connected to who and why.

The value of tools like this is in applying them to “real world” networks. In the absence of analytical tools to extract patterns from raw data, large, complex networks just look like giant hairballs.

To give you an idea, this image shows what my Facebook network looks like in Gephi before applying a layout algorithm,

Click image to enlarge

If my offspring ever had a conversation like this on Facebook, I hope to God someone would stick their thumbs in my eyeballs and kick me in the groin . . .

A 2011 study by telecommunications giant Ericsson found that 35% of iPhone and Android users check their email or Facebook account before getting out of bed in the morning.

Unlike highly recruited athletes, kids who are highly recruited academically don’t get to go on TV and turn over hats so everyone knows what college they’re going to.

Northwood doesn’t have highly recruited athletes, so there’s a Facebook site where they can check in and state their college choice.

Also unlike athletes, who are evaluated on a 5-star scale, Northwood students are evaluated on a 3-star scale, according to the commencement program that I have right here in front of me:

*** = Highest honors (4.3 GPA or above)
 ** = High honors (4.0 or above, but below 4.3)
  * = Honors (Not sure; close to a 4.0 but not quite there)

It looks like Cal got the best recruiting class this year with three 3-star prospects and no one lower than 2 stars. USC and Stanford each got one 3-star recruit, as did Harvard and Yale.

To the kids going to Cal: GO BEARS!

To the kids going to USC: FIGHT ON!

To the kids going to Stanford: CONGRATULATIONS DORKS!

To everyone else: BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME!

And to the girls below: I don’t know you but you made me laugh . . .

A Facebook friend asks to me to vote for her friends Riq and Chantelle to win their dream wedding.

Clicking through on this invitation, I learn that Chantelle is a teacher and Riq is a “tattoo’r.” From the provided photo, I’d say they’re both in their mid to late 20s.

The reason they can’t afford to pay for their own wedding? They have five kids.

I post a comment: they already have five kids?!?!

Response: Previous marriages no judging! Just vote

Then this follow-up comment from someone I don’t know: By the way that was excellent advise [sic], we should indeed never prejudge, because people who prejudge only assume things and don’t get the facts straight.

OK, this guy needs to get his shit together and calm down. I’m not “prejudging” anybody; I’m evaluating people’s mental stability (or lack thereof) based on their accumulated number of kids, spouses and tattoos.

Big difference.

Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you; spend a lot of time with them and it will change your life.

— Amy Poehler, Harvard commencement 2011

Great advice from Amy Poehler, whoever she is. (A little research turns up the fact that she’s been in TV shows and movies with Tina Fey.)

Thank god my kid isn’t going to Harvard! Do you have any idea what it costs to send a kid to an Ivy League university?! After which you get as a commencement speaker, not Tina Fey — which would be merely terrible, because at least people have heard of her — but Tina Fey’s sidekick.

I’m reminded of the story of the SpongeBob and James D. Watson bobbleheads. SpongeBob has almost 23 million Likes on Facebook. Amy Poehler is giving commencement speeches at Harvard. James D. Watson is alive but unknown, not invited to commencements, and hardly anyone likes him on Facebook.

Lesson learned: If you want to be liked by a lot of people, provide them with juvenile escapism. Don’t bother accomplishing something like, say, winning a Nobel Prize for unlocking the secret of life itself, because — who cares?

If you think saying “fuck” to a toddler is the funniest thing ever, and evidently a lot of people do judging from the rave reviews on Facebook, then you’ll love this book.

SPOILER ALERT: The joke is that infants don’t have the same sleep patterns as grownups — ha ha — which is breaking news to this hapless unfit shithead of a parent, who spews page after page of rhymed obscenities at his child.

I didn’t say “fuck” to my kid until he was a teenager, and even then it wasn’t to be funny.

Seriously: Children are a gift from God and I don’t even believe in God. I love the time that my son and I were boys together more than I love anything.

If you think there’s anything clever or funny about this book, please stay away from me . . .

I just noticed on Facebook that 16 million people like Skittles.

I hate Skittles.

Worst of all, they look like M&Ms, so you think you’re going to get some delicious M&Ms and it turns out what you’re really getting are Skittles.

• RT @yoyoha: Every woman has a tiny ball of hatred in her heart that is fed by the actions of everyone around them. #
• RT @capricecrane: Is there a “Your Kid Looks The Same As Yesterday” button on Facebook? #
• RT @yoyoha: I’m currently eating graham crackers in the shape of little bunnies. This can’t be helping my street cred. #

Created by Online Education

A Facebook friend posted some photos from the Backstreet Boys concert in L.A. last weekend. Most of the “boys” now have worse hairlines than I do.

Shouldn’t bands named Boys or Kids be forced to retire when they start to go bald?

Or at least change their name from, say, New Kids on the Block to Old Guys on the Porch?

Sarah Henderson, daughter of Fritz Henderson, the just-resigned-minutes-ago GM CEO, posted some choice words about Ed Whitacre, the random white guy taking her dad’s place at the top of the just-emerged-from-bankruptcy automaker, on the automaker’s public Facebook page!

— Daughter Of Resigned GM CEO Attacks New GM CEO On Facebook – Ed Whitacre – Jalopnik.

A friend’s Facebook post about bullies in school reminded me of when I was 10 or 11 and the neighborhood bully was menacing a junior high band nerd. All of a sudden, the band nerd hauled off and socked him right in the face and the bully ran home crying.

What an impression that made on me! Of course I’m not advocating socking bullies in the face . . . no wait, I guess I am . . .

I say to my son, “Now there’s a Firefox plugin so you can dislike stuff on Facebook. I disliked three things already.”

“Cool,” he says, walking out of the room. “I gotta get that right now.”

He comes back in with his laptop. “First I’ve got to download Firefox,” he says.

“You’re downloading Firefox just so you can dislike stuff on Facebook?”

“That’s right.”

What Happens to Your Facebook Profile When You Die?

— Yahoo! News

I plan to post updates from the afterlife. Example: “Why is everything red?”

I was reading a Tolstoy story called “Family Happiness” in bed last night. It was close to midnight when I finished it.

“Good story,” I announced to my wife, although she was 90 percent asleep by that time.

Without opening her eyes, she asked, “What was it about?”

“A man and a woman fall in love and get married. They’re very happy for a while but then the marriage starts to come apart.”

“Because the husband spends too much time on Facebook?” she asked.

“No, they didn’t have Facebook in 1860. What I didn’t see coming though is that the story turns out to have a happy ending after all.”

“Perfect,” she said. “What did you learn from it?”

“The past is gone, but you can still find a new life and a different kind of happiness.”

“With the same wife?”

“Yes.”

“Perfect,” she said.

I saw these husband and wife profile photos on a Facebook friend list:

The photo on the left is the husband’s profile photo. He looks like a more effeminate, French-looking version of the Dos Equis guy.

The photo on the right is the wife’s profile photo.

You’ll notice it’s the same photo, but she’s taken a page from the Stalin revisionist history playbook and removed hubby from the photo.

And note that she didn’t just crop him out, which would be the easy thing to do. She went to the trouble of firing up some photo editing software, erasing him, and recreating her bustline against the new background.

She’s just not that into you!

Seen on Facebook:

Original Poster: RIP Michael Jacokson!

Commenter: Michael Jacokson died on the same day as Michael Jackson? How bizarre is that?

Original Poster: OMFG really!! I think the death of Michael JACKSON is more important than a freakin typo!

Commenter: So Michael Jacokson is still alive? THANK GOD!

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This showed up on Facebook this morning (name changed):

Jacques Strap is amazed that God cares about even the smallest details of my life.

In the words of Lyle Lovett: “That’s the difference between God and me.”

This exchange — a post followed by a comment — showed up on my Facebook home page today. The poster and the commenter are both women, btw . . .

let’s play a game! Who am I?? I’m the first to talk shit behind peoples back, but when I’m talked about i’m the first to get all pissy! Who am I?

Every female known to man.

I spit cola all over my desk when I read that . . .