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.

After analyzing these connections, Pete divided the United States into seven different regions, at least when it comes to Facebook friending:

• Stayathomia
• Dixie
• Greater Texas
• Mormonia
• Nomadic West
• Socalistan
• Pacifica

On Stayathomia:

Stretching from New York to Minnesota, this belt’s defining feature is how near most people are to their friends, implying they don’t move far. In most cases outside the largest cities, the most common connections are with immediately neighboring cities, and even New York only has one really long-range link in its top 10. Apart from Los Angeles, all of its strong ties are comparatively local.

On Mormonia:

The only region that’s completely surrounded by another cluster, Mormonia mostly consists of Utah towns that are highly connected to each other, with an offshoot in Eastern Idaho. It’s worth separating from the rest of the West because of how interwoven the communities are, and how relatively unlikely they are to have friends outside the region.

On the Nomadic West:

The defining feature of this area is how likely even small towns are to be strongly connected to distant cities, it looks like the inhabitants have done a lot of moving around the county. For example, Boise, ID, Bend, OR and Phoenix, AZ all have much wider connections than you’d expect for towns their size.

Check out profiles for all the regions here.

Posted on February 22, 2010 at 3:33 pm
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Categorised under : Meta: User-generated content , regional
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