The social graph of the whole US | Hacker News Reader

The social graph of the whole US

petewarden.typepad.com

133 pointspetewarden26 comments

> it doesn't look like Washingtonians are big travelers compared to the rest of the West

Add edges into Canada to the graph. Half the tourists here in Vancouver on a normal year (i.e. not this one) are from Seattle.

I was pleased to see that the notion of a "Cascadian" cultural region is actually visible in his data.

This is some awesome data - I bet we'll be seeing a bunch of social science PhDs based on data sets like these in the next 1-5 years. It will be really interesting to see how this social graph evolves with time, and what it can predict about things like migration, the economy, and the nature of our relationships.

And then there's this weird group of people who don't use Facebook at all. Or so I've heard.

FYI, the Mormon -> Twilight relationship is due to the fact that the author of the series is Mormon.

The same goes for Glenn Beck -- he's the favorite commentator in the group because he's Mormon too.

Also Mormons tend to be conservative and Glenn Beck is one of the most popular conservative commentators.

I'm curious about how the data was gathered.

Possibly using this trick to request the JSON friendlist of any user that surfaced a week ago?

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/4726/view-faceboo...

[EDIT]: Looks like the data was scraped from publicly available profiles: http://fanpageanalytics.com/about.php

Wow, this is really fascinating, and I can confirm that Missouri, or at least my south-west part of it, indeed belongs to "Greater Texas". I think that's also true for Louisiana as well, which is where my mom is from.

C. Etzel Pearcy, some professor from some place, drafted up this concept in the 70s to resituate the States into better social groups and to allow more even representation.

Map: http://i.imgur.com/Uway1.jpg

Descriptions: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2006/09/10/5-the-38-state-u... http://www.tjc.com/38states/

I've also seen maps where it's split into 9 nations:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=...

Really nice work.. thanks for the post!

Is it ironic that Socialistan is nearing bankruptcy?

It's Socalistan, like SoCal.

Oh jeez, I read it as "Socialistan" as well. Odd.

Hmmm, until I looked closely based on this thread, I too read it as Socialistan. That says more about us than the author, who named is Socal... because "LA is definitely the center of gravity for this cluster."

Not really. "Social" is a word, the entire article is about a social network, and it's seen probably a hundred times a day. "SoCal", especially when not internally capitalized, is not something most people encounter every day.

We see it more because we see it more, and "li" in a sans seriffed font is very difficult to correctly parse, so we read it as we see it at a glance, which defaults to a word we know.

edit: socali socali social socali social social socali social (read it as quickly as you read this, and tell me which there were more of)

It probably doesn't help that, while "Socal" is associated with LA in our consciousness, "socialism" is also associated with California, in the sense that California is a leftish, high-tax state. I certainly didn't agree with the appraisal of CA as socialist, but I've heard it so often that the confusion of parsing neologisms like "Socalistan" led me fairly readily to the assumption that this guy was making a political statement.

Interesting idea, but were the somewhat derogatory names really necessary? It seems the best way to describe people is to start by not insulting them.

Why are the names derogatory? I grew up in Stayathomia and now live in Socalistan.

Sorry if they come across as offensive, I was aiming for whimsical[1]. The one I worried most about was Dixie, since I'm a foreigner and know I might miss some of the historical subtleties.

[1] Well, apart from calling Seattle boring, that was deliberate

I don't think any of the names were offensive.

Referring to the Deep South as Dixie is just fine. And interestingly, it doesn't really extend west to Louisiana according to my mother, who'd from it.

> "[1] Well, apart from calling Seattle boring, that was deliberate"

Care to shed some light on this? I'm in Seattle right now and I too find it incredibly dull (today was a rare exception) - was wondering what your experiences were with this town.

Just a joke aimed at my friends in Seattle. They're just so damn nice they might as well be Canadian.

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