Disunited Social States of America

They say that if Facebook was a country, it would be 350m people and the same size as the USA. Interestingly though, it's social networks break down into a number of regional ones, as noted in the diagram by Pete Warden (see above). He defines 6 distinct regions:

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.


Dixie

Probably the least surprising of the groupings, the Old South is known for its strong and shared culture, and the pattern of ties I see backs that up. Like Stayathomia, Dixie towns tend to have links mostly to other nearby cities rather than spanning the country. Atlanta is definitely the hub of the network, showing up in the top 5 list of almost every town in the region. Southern Florida is an exception to the cluster, with a lot of connections to the East Coast, presumably sun-seeking refugees.

Greater Texas

Orbiting around Dallas, the ties of the Gulf Coast towns and Oklahoma and Arkansas make them look more Texan than Southern. Unlike Stayathomia, there's a definite central city to this cluster, otherwise most towns just connect to their immediate neighbors.

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.

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:

Socalistan

Sorry Bay Area folks, but LA is definitely the center of gravity for this cluster. Almost everywhere in California and Nevada has links to both LA and SF, but LA is usually first. Part of that may be due to the way the cities are split up, but in tribute to the 8 years I spent there, I christened it Socalistan. Californians outside the super-cities tend to be most connected to other Californians, making almost as tight a cluster as Greater Texas.

Pacifica

The most boring of the clusters, the area around Seattle is disappointingly average. Tightly connected to each other, it doesn't look like Washingtonians are big travelers compared to the rest of the West, even though a lot of them claim to need a vacation!

I guess Amishia doesn't make it as they don't have the Interenetz

Update 6 April - the guy who did this is being sued by Facebook but that doesn't solve the problem - Fast Company:

Facebook was none too pleased: They first requested a thorough scrubbing of the data, to eliminate any personal info that might be used by spammers. And eventually, they simply threatened to sue Warden, unless he deleted all the data. They were alleging a terms of service violation. Warden didn't have any money to fight the suit, so he deleted the data.

......

"To the many researchers I've disappointed, there's a whole world of similar data available from other sources too. By downloading the Google Profile crawling code you can build your own data set, and it's easy enough to build something similar for Twitter. I'm already in the middle of some new research based on public Buzz information, so this won't be stopping my work."