Inspired by a comment by moonfl0wer I started thinking about how many
connections there are in lj.

Having recently read a couple of articles about visualizing the structure of socal networks
(granted, mostly about crime amd terrorist families, but interesting nonetheless) I decided
to give a try at visualizing a couple of degrees of seperation of “friends” on lj. A little
bit of math and anything beyond two degrees is getting hairy, and anything beyond three is
completely out of hand.

So, whipped up a python script to fetch the friend info from the LJ userinfo pages
and built a data file for feeding to graphviz.
The two degree of seperation chart for me can be seen at
aklikins.ps. Warning: It’s a pretty large
postscript file. I couldnt find a good way to get the list of friends for a given
user other than just parsing the html on the userinfo page. Is there a better way?
All of the client protocol stuffs only lets you query for your user.

I suspect if the lj maintainers wanted, they could generated this kind of info alot
quicker than I could. Possibly even doing a “six degrees” kind of thing.

Did I mention, I’m a geek?