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I was revisiting the TouchGraph Google Browser again this evening to see if it had changed at all in the past year. It hasn’t, but its core functionality remains interesting - utilising Google’s data on ’similar sites’ the tool provides information on Internet nodes and a website’s respective position within one. By entering a URL, an interactive virtual map is generated of a website’s popularity in its main fields. This ‘nodal view’ is useful for understanding why links from relevant websites are worth more than links from irrelevant ones in search engine optimisation, whilst making it easier to visualise how the World Wide Web looks to search engine crawlers like the Googlebot.

I came across another similar node analysis tool in a TouchGraph related blog, this one based upon top US company information from 2004. Called ‘They Rule‘ it allows a user to create maps of interlocking directories of companies and their board members based on information stored in a database. It reminded me very much of the nodal view identified in Albert-László Barabási’s book ‘Linked‘ and using the ‘find connection’ function I was able to get from a single contact at arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin to child friendly Toys ‘R’ Us in 3 easy steps… it is indeed a small world.

TouchGraph technology has also been applied to a social networking service called LiveJournal. In that instance it is possible to visualise social networking connections and friendships for users of that service (a network of 300,000 bloggers). Available for download at TouchGraph LiveJournal - a single user ‘colababy263′ is linked to just six other users, one of these users however ‘John’ is linked to hundreds if not thousands of people. He is therefore a visual example of the connectors discussed by Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point. All fun to play around with!

Technorati Tags: social networks, social nodes, tipping point, touchgraph

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