Viral spread of Facebook app from Stew.

From the Vimeo page:

“The movie above shows signup and invite data from the Bookshare Facebook application from July 18th of last year to now. As users sign up they are geolocated and plotted on the map. More users in a particular location mean brighter spots. Invites from one user to another are drawn as snaking lines that travel from the city of the inviter to the city of the invitee.”

(The actual application appears to have been written in Processing???)

The video really emphasizes cases where there is a lot of physical distance between people who are inviting others to install the application. The most dramatic streaks appear to come from people in Australia inviting people in London/Northern Europe (I might be wrong about the countries because they’re not clearly outlined on the map). Unfortunately people inviting others in the same city don’t have quite the same visual impact, appearing as golden dots and mini geysers. The final image gives a nice summary of the geographic areas in which Bookshare has caught on.

I’d love to see this contrasted with an abstracted version just showing the links between people and the spread of invites through the network.