Mapping My Plazes Network with NetworkX

After some experimenting with the Mac OS X application NodeBox to map my [[Plazes]] friends network, I graduated to a a more universal solution using NetworkX today.

I used a modified version of my Python code and an Amazon EC2 instance (setup instructions) to make images like this:

There are higher resolutions versions of the first and second images if you want to look at the details. The rendering is less sophisticated that my NodeBox experiments, mostly because NodeBox has some built-in styling that I didn’t attempt to fully recreate using NetworkX.

The updated Python script is smarter too: it now grabs all of each users friends, not just the first 50. Unfortunately this also results in significantly more demands on the script: in a network where some users have 500 friends, the number of nodes and edges gets really huge really fast. Hence my use of EC2 to get maximum processorage thrown at the problem.