Facebook clearly has some above-average interns, including one who mapped 10 million pairs of friends on the social network and watched as the webs of relationships formed a detailed map of the world. Read the article in the Los Angeles Times here:
Paul Butler, an intern with the data infrastructure engineering team, created links between a random sample of friends. As he tweaked the design, he began to see continents and even individual countries emerge from the blob of lines.
The eastern half of the U.S. and most of Europe feature dense patchworks of friends, while large swaths of Africa, China and South America are sparsely lined.
