This also creates a separation from any seldom outrageous political statements I may make on my personal page or beach photos of me and personal friends, which are no business of my professional colleagues.
Much has been written about this separation and the legality of corporate entities utilizing social network information to make judgments about employment decisions.
http://national-employment-screening.com/using-social-networking-sites-in-employment.htm
I raise this point, as it was very interesting to me during the analysis the past 2 weeks with both the http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com as well as the Netvizz/Gephi analysis on the specific cliques within each of my networks.
On the personal network side, I saw a lot of my life's passions in the connections I have on FB, between Triathlon, my family and highschool friends, and my Wine passion, each were very specifically designated in the subnetwork communities. There were some that were very tightly clustered in a dense fashion and there were some that had a meganode HUB with a high degree and lots of connections.
On the professional network side, I again saw a lot of my history from the few companies that I have been involved with and the networks that those have created. I really enjoyed reviewing the networks and then discovering some of the contacts from one subnetwork cluster actually had a connection in my other subnetwork cluster that I hadn't facilitated. Just fantastic.
It was great to be able to apply the technical analysis of degree, centrality, density, clustering and clustering coefficients, diameter, and eccentricity to data that I was familiar with, which really enhances the learning enrichment. When reviewing the networks visually, it provides and entirely different perspective on the data and the network connections.
Below is picture of my LinkedIn Network.
As far as the analysis technicality, Gephi is a great tool for both visualizing the network as well as performing analysis on it. The one improvement that I think it could make (and maybe it does it today) is the ability to scroll across the visualized network when it is zoomed in. I couldn't easily figure out how to do that. I wanted to zoom in closely and then be able to scroll around the network up and down. I was able to grab part of the network with one or more nodes and yank them to a different part of the visualization screen.
It was fairly quick to learn how to use Gephi and the download of the data was straight forward from netvizz and FB. Similarly, the data generation from the inmaps from LinkedIn was very straight forward, but it did take a long time to generate my network as I had a lot of links and nodes.
Below is a picture of my Facebook network.
Overall, I enjoyed the network analysis and learned a bit more about myself and a lot about the network analysis.
