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A FACEBOOK intern has created a map of the world made by joining the dots between friendships.
The map displays friendships between Facebook users as light blue lines on a deep blue background.
The eastern half of the US, Europe and parts of Indonesia shine the brightest, while China, Russia and central Africa are mainly dark.
Paul Butler, an intern with the social networking website's data infrastructure engineering team, said the map was based on about 10 million friendships.
"I began by taking a sample of about 10 million pairs of friends from Apache Hive, our data warehouse," he said in a post on Facebook.
"I combined that data with each user's current city and summed the number of friends between each pair of cities. Then I merged the data with the longitude and latitude of each city."
Mr Butler said he was "taken aback" when he first saw the project worked and the lines took the form of a map of the world.
"Not only were continents visible, certain international borders were apparent as well," he said.
"What really struck me, though, was knowing that the lines didn't represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships.
"Each line might represent a friendship made while travelling, a family member abroad, or an old college friend pulled away by the various forces of life."
The map displays friendships between Facebook users as light blue lines on a deep blue background.
The eastern half of the US, Europe and parts of Indonesia shine the brightest, while China, Russia and central Africa are mainly dark.
Paul Butler, an intern with the social networking website's data infrastructure engineering team, said the map was based on about 10 million friendships.
"I began by taking a sample of about 10 million pairs of friends from Apache Hive, our data warehouse," he said in a post on Facebook.
"I combined that data with each user's current city and summed the number of friends between each pair of cities. Then I merged the data with the longitude and latitude of each city."
Mr Butler said he was "taken aback" when he first saw the project worked and the lines took the form of a map of the world.
"Not only were continents visible, certain international borders were apparent as well," he said.
"What really struck me, though, was knowing that the lines didn't represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships.
"Each line might represent a friendship made while travelling, a family member abroad, or an old college friend pulled away by the various forces of life."
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