The Geography of Facebook
July 18th, 2007by Sean Gorman
David here at FortiusOne decided to do some investigation and build out a dataset the number of members in the different regional networks on Facebook. When you register on Facebook you can join one regional network for the place you consider home. David tallied up the numbers for all the regional networks and geo-referenced the data set, and the top cities ranked out as such:
1. New York, NY = 273530
2. Chicago, IL = 246759
3. Washington, DC = 210160
4. Boston, MA = 171837
5. Atlanta, GA = 156643
6. Los Angeles, CA = 144718
7. Dallas / Fort Worth, TX = 120602
8. Minneapolis / St. Paul, MN =114404
9. Philadelphia, PA = 112495
10, Detroit, MI = 110704
The fascinating bit of this is how few west coast cities there are on the top ten list - only Los Angeles. The trend is even more striking when mapped out: The Boston Washington corridor is flaming and Chicago definitely stands out in the midwest. So, why is Facebook not as big on the West Coast? Does the West Coast use other services, are there fewer universities, or are they on to the next new new thing.
Popularity: 60% [?]
July 18th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
Didn’t Facebook start in an Ivy League school? Harvard I think? That would explain the concentration in the northeast.
Also interesting is the high placement of the Twin Cities. Something like the 12-15th largest metro showing up as the 8th most represented in facebook.
July 18th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
Ya - Zuckerburg was a Harvard student when it started. Fascinating that the geography of the innovation has played such a big role in its diffusion. We are working on normalizing the data by the population of the region, which should highlight the densest Facebook locations. It will be fun to see if anyone trumps the Twin Cities - I’d guess some of the college towns.
July 23rd, 2007 at 10:14 pm
I’m curious how the made was map, and how exactly the data was applied to it. From the map, it would appear that the vast majority of Facebook users are in Kentucky, though I’m not quite sure that’s the case. While I understand the statistical differences between eastern/midwestern cities and western cities, it seems that the map over-dramatizes the gap.
July 24th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
Hi Jeremy,
Good observation and correct. We did an upgrade to GeoCommons on Monday and it effected the mashups. Looks like the search radius on the heatmaps was increased quite a bit causing things to look askew. I went back and fixed the Facebook map so it should more accurately reflect the data. In general the heatmaps use an averaging algorithm , so the further away you zoom the more blurred together things get. Vice versa as you zoom in you get more detail and it becomes less blurry.
August 1st, 2007 at 10:41 pm
In Canada, it seems that it is everywhere except Quebec
http://geographyoffacebook.wordpress.com/
April 15th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
I think more intersting thean normalising the data as a population density, would be a study of linking a persons Facebook friends , With Toblers first law fo geography, “Everything is related to everything else, and near things are more related than distant things”. While the results would appear to be obvoius I would enjoy seeing them plotted and I may attempt to get my classes this year to plot their results for homework or an assessment
April 16th, 2008 at 11:12 am
Unfortunately the data available from Facebook only has the total number of users in each regional network and not a map of how a users social network maps to this. Back in GMU we played around with writing bots that would scare the social graph and the regional network, but never got around to it. Some of this may be available now through API’s or OpenSocial, but have not looked into at all.