• All Facebook, Tuesday, December 14, 2010 12:55 PM

Paul Butler, an engineering intern at Facebook has rendered the social net's social graph into a dazzling visual map of friendships. According to All Facebook, the map also proves Butler's theory that "geography and political borders influence where people live in relation to their friends." Writes Butler in a blog post: "To my relief, what I saw was roughly an outline of the world."

Also of note, "What Butler did with the data is similar to -- although much more elaborate than -- what a programmer outside Facebook tried to do with some of the site's profile data, before he was threatened with a lawsuit," writes GigaOm. "Pete Warden scraped information from millions of profiles and then analyzed it to see the connections between states and between countries, and drew interactive maps based on the number of those connections. But Facebook threatened him with legal action and he was forced to delete the data, because his scraping of user profiles was against the site's terms of service."

Read the whole story at All Facebook »