Recently we’ve posted a visualisation of the Italian Network of FriendFeed. Such a map was an interesting and general perspective showing how a complex network can be visualised. Obviously when we’re dealing with social networks or microblogging sites we’re dealing with a complex network emerging from many different egonetworks. How is the perspective over the same Network (Italian Friendfeed Users) if we observe it from the inside?
Starting from the same dataset we’ve used for the previous visualisation we generated an Egonetwork using as central user one of the minor nodes of the global visualisation. We chose the user lucamondini who, at that time, had a rather small network: 150 following and 200 followers. The idea was to see how the network looked like when the observer was one of the peripheral nodes.
An explanation of nodes sizes and colours can be found here, what’s interesting is that switching the perspective to this user’s point of view the overall scenario change. Even if it is always possible to find major and minor nodes they don’t seem to be necessarily the same nodes of the global map. Of course users that are very popular within the whole network seem to be quite popular also within local egonetwork but their specific size is different. Moving our observation to nodes that are even more peripheral (we chose the user magicabula, 21 followers and 33 following) – since it has so few followers this user wasn’t included into the global visualisation – will show a small network of highly connected users where some of the users are heavily connected even in the global map and some have a large authority only within this local perspective.
When we’re dealing with social network and information propagation we must keep in mind that the scenario might be really different when it is observed from the far periphery of the network.