1. Vizster: Visualizing Online Social Networks Authors: Jeffrey Heer and Danah Boyd Presented by: Jeanne Kramer-Smyth Machon Gregory

2. Goals for Vizster Fun New way to visualize and explore social networks

3. Social Networking Sites 1993 2007

4. Identity Groups of FriendsterEarly Adoptors Gay men Techies/bloggers “Burners” (those who attend Burning Man)

5. More About Friendster Originally meant to be a dating site People joined because their friends joined “Fakesters” – fake profiles created to connect people with shared interests Competition to collect as many people as possible in order to be on the ‘first page’ of friend lists

6. Vizster Overview Ego-centric graph view of a social network Allows for data exploration Search, Connections, Clustering, X-ray View Animated force directed layout –Barnes-Hut Algorithm Linkage based clustering algorithm –Newman's Community Identification Algorithm

7. Mechanics with Pictures Connected people move closer together Large groups of connected people push away other large groups of people People with few connections are pulled in to ‘orbit’ large groups of people

8. Demo Video

9. Initial View Egocentric Not full overview – only shows those people connected to central person Includes connections between all users displayed.

10. Search Highlights people matching search criteria Greys out all other displayed people

11. Show Connections Permits users to find out how two displayed users are connected Will add connecting users to display Not obvious in interface – but useful once explained.

12. Clusters Create Communities Clustering logic based on linkages creates community displays Slide bar permits users to step through the phases of grouping to find what ‘looks right’ – supports subjective view of groups

13. X-Ray View Users select attribute to display (such as gender or number of connections) Removing photos and other visual cues supports seeing patterns of selected attribute

14. X-Ray View + Search Powerful combination Still greys out those people who do not fit the search criteria Still color codes results based on selected x-ray attribute

15. Underlying Technologies Prefuse is an extensible framework written in Java designed to create interactive information visualization tools –Vizster, Namesearcher, Social Action Lucene is a search engine API – Wikipedia, Beagle, CNet

16. Evaluation of Vizster Social observation – 500 person party in San Francisco Individual observation in lab setting

17. Questions?