Facebook Draws a Map of the Connected World

If there’s one thing you get when you have close to 600 million users the way Facebook does, it’s a lot of data about how they are all connected. When you plot those inter-relationships based on location, as one of the company’s engineers found, you get a world map made up of social connections. There are gaps in the data, of course, with dark spots in China and other countries that block the social network (or have large competitors of their own, as Russia does with VKontakte), but the result is an amazing picture of a connected world. If that’s what an intern at Facebook can come up with, imagine what else would be possible with that data.