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New Social-Network Mapping Tools Are Emerging
There are many new visualization tools around us which try to map our social networks. In "Who Loves Ya, Baby?," Steven Johnson examines a tool created by Valdis Krebs, a former IBMer, half sociologist and half digital cartographer. He spent more than 15 years to create a software called InFlow. Now he's doing social maps full-time. Many of his organizational maps are based on surveys taken of employees answering questions about whom they collaborate with, what their work patterns are. That data is then fed into InFlow, which paints striking visual portraits of social structures in organizations. They look almost like images from a chemistry textbook— dozens of molecules strung together in an intricate shape, each one representing an employee. The links between each person are a way of visualizing the flow of information through a company. "The maps show how ideas happen, how decision making happens, who the real experts are that everybody goes to," Krebs says. InFlow is in fact a datamining tool for your e-mail repository. Assuming you have a significant amount of e-mail traffic, the software will create a remarkably sophisticated assessment of your various social groups, showing you not only their relative size but also the interactions between different groups. If your college buddies have grown close to members of your family, you'll see those two groups overlap on the screen, like two crowds huddled next to each other. If these visualizations are interesting for individuals, they're even more interesting for large organizations, where social networks can play a key role in the success or failure of the operation without any individual really knowing where all the networks are. Another social mapping tool is the TouchGraph GoogleBrowser, which uses Amazon or Google Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to visually describe how books and Web sites connect with one another. For more information about TouchGraph GoogleBrowser, please read "Amazon, Google lead new path to Web services." Finally, another tool emerges yesterday which provides another visual interface to Google results. Here is what Cathleen Moore writes in "Google gains visual searches." Data-visualization software provider anacubis this week integrated its anacubis Viewer technology with the Google Web APIs service to allow developers to visually explore relationships between Web sites. The technology "can help you discover linkages in the information to get a better understanding of the data," said Greg Coyle, vice president of business development at anacubis in Cambridge, England. "It is a challenge to get that kind of intelligence out of pages and pages of text." Considering that more than two thirds of our brain cells are dedicated to vision, these tools make sense. If you know about other similar new tools, please tell me and I'll gather your comments in a future story. Sources: Roland Piquepaille, March 15, 2003; Steven Johnson, DISCOVER Vol. 24 No. 4 (April 2003); Margaret Kane, CNET News.com , November 20, 2002; Cathleen Moore, InfoWorld, March 14, 2003
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