If you’re wondering why it’s so hard to get anything done politically– and who isn’t these day–one reason may be found in the data provided by an analysis of 210 million public profiles on Facebook. Earlier in the week we did a post on an interactive map that resulted from that project, and which draws [...]

The search technology blog PeteSearch has a fascinating post on the geographical connections of Facebook friends. The Pete in PeteSearch gathered data on 210 million public profiles on the ‘book and created an interactive map with lines drawn between areas that share a lot of friends. As Pete explains it, “For example, a lot of people in LA have friends in San Francisco, so there’s a line between them.”

The map has three tabs at the top, one each for connections between countries, U.S. states, and U.S. cities.

Some random results:

• California users have strong connections to the East Coast states of New York and Massachussetts, and to Washington D.C. But the state also has a line drawn to Texas and the state of Washington.
• Chicago users connect mostly to those in Los Angeles, New York, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Atlanta.
• U.S. users in the aggregate connect mostly to other English speaking countries, but also to the Philippines and Indonesia.

As we’ve already seen, courtesy of the health care debate: Ideologies are colliding within people’s very own Friends List on Facebook. Another such interaction: