information aesthetics

a sophisticated social network data visualization system that end-users of social networking services can use to facilitate discovery & increased awareness of their online community. vizster presents social networks using a simple network node-link representation, where nodes represent members of the system & links represent the articulated 'friendship' links between them. network members are depicted using both their self-provided name & a representative image. the networks are presented as 'egocentric' networks, consisting of an individual & their immediate friends. users can expand the display by selecting nodes to make visible others’ immediate friends as well. in addition, inferred community groupings of two or more nodes are visibly represented as 'blobs' surrounding community members, taking advantage of low spatial frequencies to make community structures apparent.
this work will be presented at the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization conference next week. see also the Enron email visualization. [jheer.org & jheer.org(pdf)]