• Mood: connected
• Music: Haydn: Oxford Symphony

Networky stuff

I have a fascination with the way people are connected. I always play a game where whenever I meet a new person, I try to figure out a mutual acquaintance. I first encountered this under the name of 'Jewish geography' but I'm pretty good at it with non-Jews too. And I just love learning about connections between people that I know for different reasons.

So it's not surprising I was eager to sign up for an LJ mind map. In the event it doesn't really appear to tell me very much. If you pay you get a colour version, which might be slightly more informative but I suspect not sufficiently so to justify spending the money.

I'm mainly posting it as an excuse to link to lots of cool posts about friend networks.

• pseudomonas made a fun tool that draws pretty pictures of how different groups fit together.
• rho talks about interconnectness and defines a particular multi-tentacled group that I have several contacts with.
• fluffymark comments intelligently on rho's post and sparks some interesting discussion.
• doseybat also responds to rho's post and provokes some great comments from clever people (791point43 and compilerbitch).

Lots of fun stuff here; I'm just lapping it up, and I think it's good to collect all these cool thoughts in one place!

(I've also tried to run the Touchgraph friends list browser, but it crashes with error messages that mean nothing to me because I'm a spoiled and clueless Windows user used to nice, straightforward self-extracting files.)

Addendum 25.9.04: mathcathy found the coolest friends network visualization ever!!!

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And yeah, the new version of the update page is very, very broken. It was theoretically tested pre-relase but. Over 30 separate issues reported and it's only been just over an hour.