We've talked before about the massive amount of data running through Facebook's systems. We have Lexicon to help visualize what people are talking about on the site, but we don't yet have any similar, graphics-driven way to show the site's constant activity and connections. Taking a break from my normal job (if dealing with Facebook's massive scalability challenges counts as normal) at the most recent hackathon, I decided to brush off my graphics abilities and work on something more visual.
I focused on a project known as Palantir. We're still experimenting with it, but the idea is to show Facebook in action, with people's interactions speeding across a computer model of the earth, as if friend requests, messages or photo-sharing exchanges were bursts of light or airplanes flying to their destinations.
Continue reading.
You can also check out this video they've posted, which you can watch even without a Facebook account:
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=37403547074
This scale of interaction is radically unprecedented. The relevancy of physical location to social interaction is rapidly decreasing. And we've only seen the tip of the iceberg.
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