Vonnegut would be proud

Wait--"friends from college" are supposed to help our careers over the years?

See the cat, see the cradle?

I already know who my friends and family are. But this seems like a nice methodology for telling other people who I'm connected with...

Holy Vonnegut, Batman!

It's all granfalloonery.

Edited by author 03-14-2003 05:39 PM
Presumably IBM will now be promoting those "gurus" amongst their staff who spam their colleagues email, pass on "jokes", recipes, and viruses or engage in flame wars, all of which should boost their "social network" score.

Almost every police force and intelligence agency in Europe uses similar "intelligence visualisation" software which can automatically process your emails, phone logs, informer denunciations etc etc into "friendship trees" e.g. http://www.i2group.com/applications/proactive.html

Yes, you too can suffer from "guilt by association" if you belong to the wrong Mosque or drink in the wrong bar, pay cash for your Delta Airlines ticket etc all of which raise your secret police "zapiska" score above a certain (secret) level.

Edited by author 03-15-2003 01:40 PM
There are many new visualization tools around us which try to map our social networks. In this column, I not only examined Inflow, the datamining tool Steven Johnson talked about." I also peeked at TouchGraph GoogleBrowser, which uses Amazon or Google Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to visually describe how books and Web sites connect with one another. Finally, I took a look at a brand new way of visualizing Google search results, from anacubis. If you know about other similar new tools, please tell me and I'll gather your comments in a future story.

There's FoaF which hasn't been mentioned (http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/)