Facebook's 'Visualizing Friendships' Maps the World

Paul Butler, an intern on Facebook's data infrastructure engineering team, put together a fascinating graphic titled "Visualizing Friendships". With a random sampling of 10 million Facebook users across the world, Butler plotted arcs between friends based on the longitude and latitude of each person.

What emerged from a black canvas background was a captivating replication of the world map. The most advanced technological countries and areas see their borders outlined very clearly while others are lost in the darkness.