Facebook Friend Clustering

My wife is currently reading Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) and pointed me to this interesting Relationship Test tool she learned about in the book. It analyzes your Facebook friends and then shows both their connections to you and to each other. The graph assigns weight to relationships, so "cliques" of friends will cluster together.  Here is the result I get:

Ken Weiner's Friend Graph

The white circle in the center is myself.  The cluster in the upper left identifies my friends from my
high school, Agoura High School.  The cluster in the lower right is mostly coworkers from my previous job at LowerMyBills.com. The 2 less-defined clusters to the right of my high school cluster is a mix of family and college friends.

In addition to visualizing friend clusters, this tool also tries to identify your spouse or romantic partner using an algorithm from a paper called Romantic Partnerships and the Dispersion of Social Ties:
A Network Analysis of Relationship Status on Facebook. It tries to answer this question:

Given all the connections among a person's friends, can you recognize his or her romantic partner from the network structure alone?

It measures something called dispersion - the extent to which two people's mutual friends are not themselves well-connected.

On my network, it worked extremely well, identifying my wife as the person with whom I have the highest dispersion score (called assimilation score in this tool).

Portion of my Facebook Connections Sorted by Assimilation Score

This means that it is through my wife that I am connected to the most people that aren't themselves connected.  This is natural, of course, because I have met my wife's high school friends, college friends, and coworkers, most of which don't know each other.

There are a few people that rank high on the list that aren't actually "central" to my life.  If I ignore all the people with less that 3 mutual friends, the list becomes much more meaningful and predictive of who really is central to my life.

The ability to analyze my social network like this motivated me to visit Facebook and Unfriend acquaintances that I really never developed much of a relationship with.  Now, both my Facebook news feed and Dispersion scores will be that much more meaningful!

Products I Can't Live Without - 2009

Inspired by this post from Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, I thought it would be interesting to make my own annual list of products and services that I can't live without. Here we go for 2009 (in the order that they came to mind):

Gmail, Google Calendar, Remember The Milk, iPhone, F-Spot, Quicken, Google Reader, Facebook, Google Sites, Flickr, iTunes, Twitter, Jungle Disk, Dropbox, Delicious

Gmail
I use this every minute every day for both personal and work email (my company uses Google Apps for email and calendar). I just love the user interface and ease of accessing it on the web and the iPhone. Beats the hell out of Outlook for work email.

Google Calendar
Again, this is how I keep track of temporal events in my life both at home and at work. I love that I can get text messages with alerts for calendar events.

Remember The Milk
Ever since reading David Allan's Getting Things Done, I was in search of a tool to put his ideas to work. About a year ago, I settled with Remember The Milk (RTM) and have used it ever since for task management. The user interface is outstanding and I can access it from the web and iPhone. Perhaps the best feature is that it integrates perfectly with Gmail as a "Gadget".

iPhone
I don't identify with being an Apple person, but I couldn't resist the lure of the iPhone. It really adds a lot of value to my life as I can manage email, read blogs, listen to Podcasts, use Google Maps, locate GeoCaches, and even SSH to a server at work. Oh, and visual voice mail rocks!

F-Spot
This GNOME desktop application is what I use to manage photos. It stores photo metadata in a SQLite database which I can easily access if I ever want to export the data somewhere else. It also makes it easy to upload photos to Flickr.

Quicken
I have been using Quicken for years to manage my personal finances. I upgrade it to the latest version every even year, so right now I have Quicken 2008. Honestly, I would love to stop using Quicken and switch to a web-based solution, but I can't find one that is fully-featured enough for me. I just have to have the ability to create arbitrary asset accounts for my wallet (cash), reimbursements, etc. Most web-based services don't offer this yet. I've got my eye on Mint which, I have a feeling, will get good enough for me to make the switch one day.

Google Reader
I read a lot of blogs. I couldn't possibly keep up if I didn't use a blog reader. In late 2008, I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader because the user interface for Google Reader just kept getting better and eventually it won me over. A big part of this was the excellent user interface of Google Reader on the iPhone.

Facebook
This barely made it to my list. Maybe I could live without it, but I do find myself checking it almost daily because so many of my friends use it and somehow it makes me feel like I'm in touch with all of them without ever really talking to them :). Also, Facebook is the platform I used to develop and launch my book sharing application We Read which continues to grow slowly, but steadily each day and recently passed 1000 users.

Google Sites
This past year I finally committed to using a wiki for my family. I have been using wikis for years for work and open source software projects, and always thought it would be useful for keeping track of personal things like lists of gifts to get people, account information for utilities, financial services, and contractors, etc, etc. I tried setting up and hosting wikis like XWiki and Confluence, but ultimately went with the free, online Google Sites which was formerly JotSpot.

Flickr
I purchased the Pro Account and now use Flickr for all my online photo sharing needs. The pro account allows me to upload an unlimited amount of photos for about $25/year. My family depends on this to see the many photos I take of my son as he grows up.

iTunes
I hate the fact that iTunes doesn't run on Linux machines, but I can't resist it because it is really the only good option for managing music and videos on an iPod. I use it daily to load up my iPhone with podcasts.

Twitter
I use Twitter a lot. I blame Twitter for killing my urge to blog. It is just so much easier to share things 140 characters at a time. I have Twitter linked with Facebook so that each Tweet I send out ends up updating my Facebook status.

Jungle Disk
This might be one of the most important services I use. It keeps my music, videos, photos, and other important files backed up on Amazon's S3 network. At only $.15/GB, it ends up being pretty cheap to store a lot of data. This way, if my house ever burns down or someone steals my computers, or I experience a hard disk failure, I will always be able to restore my precious data.

Dropbox
I have started storing all files that I access often in a special directory on each computer (home, work, laptop, etc) called the Dropbox. Each directory gets automatically synchronized so I have easy, local, access to the files I need wherever I am. It also makes it extremely easy to share files with other people that use Dropbox.

Delicious
I store all my bookmarks in Delicious and take advantage of its Firefox plugin to easily tag sites and recall sites I've already tagged. I don't do a lot with the social features of Delicious like bookmark sharing, though. Maybe it's just because I don't know which of my friends use Delicious too.

Well, there you have it! I can't wait to see how this list compares to the one I'll make in January 2010.

Facebook Has No Love for Linux

ABC News and Facebook recently added the US Politics application which tracks what's happening right now in the world of politics. As the 2008 presentational race is heating up, there are daily polls for capturing the views of Facebook users.

On my computer and web browser (Firefox 2 on Ubuntu Linux), the user interface for these polls is so messed up that I cannot vote at all. Determined to participate in the polls, I emailed Facebook support to let them know that they needed to fix the application for Linux users. This was their response:

Hi Ken,

Unfortunately, Facebook is not meant to work with Linux. Please switch to a different operating system for best results on this website. Let me know if you have any questions, and I'd be happy to help.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Maude
User Operations
Facebook

This is pathetic for a website like Facebook that would like to, and probably will, sign up everyone in the world eventually. There are millions of Linux users that they are leaving out by having this policy. Also, support for Linux wouldn't be that difficult to achieve. In fact, I have been using Facebook heavily on Linux for the past few months and this has been the very first problem I've experienced.

I wrote another email to Facebook urging them to support Linux users. If you care about the future of Facebook and other large web sites working well on Linux operating systems, I urge you to do the same.

My First Facebook App

I have been working on writing a Facebook application since September, and I'm excited to say that today, it has been approved by Facebook and is now listed in their Application Directory.

My application is called We Read and is for Facebook users to share books with their friends. It lets you comment on and discuss books and display them in your profile for your friends to see. I used Amazon Web Services and since I joined Amazon associates, I can earn a commission whenever a user clicks on one of my books and buys it on Amazon.

Please try installing We Read and let me know what you think. I plan to enhance it with new features every week or so.

Reverse SSH Tunnel For Facebook Application Development

I have been playing around with developing Facebook applications recently, and I have found it difficult to setup a development environment because to test my application, Facebook needs to access it on a remote server. If my application is running on my workstation which is behind a firewall, then Facebook has no way to access it.

A friend at work told me about The RFacebook Tunnel which allows Facebook to connect to a port on a remote server which tunnels its traffic to a local computer. That is exactly what I need, except that I'm using Java instead of Ruby to develop my application. I started looking into doing this reverse tunneling myself just using the command line and found out that it is very easy!

All I needed to do was to issue this command from my workstation:

ssh -gNR 8888:localhost:8080 www.myremoteserver.com

This creates the tunnel so that any requests to www.myremoteserver.com:8888 are forwarded to my workstation on port 8080. Voila! Now Facebook can easily access the web application I'm running locally behind a firewall.

There was one little thing I left out. In order to get the tunneling to forward traffic from machines other than myremoteserver.com, I had to edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and add the following line:

GatewayPorts yes

This site has some more information on why I had to do that.