Visualized: Facebook's global reach

If you've ever wondered what a map drawn entirely of Facebook relationships would look like, wonder no more. A Facebook intern by the name of Paul Butler has put together the above image by feeding in location data for pairs of friends, with the white lights representing cities, towns, and hamlets, and the blue streaks between them identifying relationships linking them. It's fun to see large swathes of Australia and South America devoid of Facebook activity, but check out the bit on the map where Russia and China are supposed to be -- is Facebook the most capitalist social network ever or what? Hit the source link for the full-scale image, it gets prettier the closer you get to it.

[Thanks, Ian]