Imagine a map of your Facebook friends, and the friends of your friends, and so on. The result, tada, is what you see above. The lights which you see on a deep blue background signify friendships created around the world, and how these are distributed and connected, despite the presence of political borders.
It can be perceived that the right side of the US and most parts of Europe have the highest intensity of brightness. Meanwhile, China, central Africa and Russia, remain mostly dark due to low presence of Facebook in these countries.
The Facebook world map was created by an intern of the company named Paul Butler, who sampled data from the social network's 500 million user base.. He successfully visualized the relativity of one member's location to that of his/ her Facebook friends.
Every line connects cities with pairs of friends. The brighter the line, the more friendships present between those cities.
Source: Visualizing Friendships by Paul Butler
