The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Author Walter Isaacson wrote the blockbusting, best-selling biography Steve Jobs but definitely not the straight-to-DVD movie starring what’s his face. Now Isaacson is back with another tale of American innovation, chronicling the weirdos & wizards who brought us computers and the Internet.

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Facebook Mapping

Map of the World Drawn Entirely Using Facebook Connections

The above map of the world, drawn by Facebook data structuring intern Paul Butler using connections between 10 million Facebook friends, is interesting enough in itself until you realize that all of the country borders are entirely drawn using Facebook friend connections too. Even if the world was dark and totally unmapped, Facebook could produce a remarkably good approximation of most of its continents’ boundaries, and even the borders of some countries.

It still took some clever math. Butler explains how he did it:

“I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line’s color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.

Later I replaced the lines with great circle arcs, which are the shortest routes between two points on the Earth. Because the Earth is a sphere, these are often not straight lines on the projection.
What really struck me, though, was knowing that the lines didn’t represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships. Each line might represent a friendship made while travelling, a family member abroad, or an old college friend pulled away by the various forces of life.”

Note the lack of definition in China and Russia, and the relative hole in Brazil.

Click Here to see full size image or Here to read the complete article.

Facebook – Expanded Messaging Platform

Mark Zuckerberg took the stage today during a live stream event and confirmed all of the rumors about Facebook announcing a new messaging platform. The focus was on three key areas.

Seamless Messaging

Communicating with different people requires us to think of which way each person tends to prefer to hear from us. One person may be easiest to reach via SMS, another might be email. But Facebook aims to make us not worry about that and instead just send a message – any message.

• The new system will handle SMS, all brands of Instant Messaging, E-mail, and Facebook messages
• The system also offers @facebook.com email addresses, which are presumably required to take advantage of all of the integration. You’ll get the email address that matches your user ID. (ie- facebook.com/johnpoz = johnpoz@facebook.com)

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