First Friend Social Graph Ver 3, originally uploaded by Aldon.

At the Tweetup I attended this weekend, I met @dacort who had built a tool to find the first person you followed on Twitter. Back at home, I started playing with it. It is nice set up to trace through your twitter ancestry. As I traced who I first followed, who they first followed and so on, it struck me that this would make an interesting map, so I gathered data and loaded it into Graphviz. The result is the picture you see above.

A few interesting things to note: Many people ultimately lead back to @jack. @jack first followed @lane who first followed @jack. Four of the streams go through @missrogue to @jack and three through @factoryjoe. @biz is pretty far back in the structure, and he was first followed by @stevegarfield, @Scobleizer and @darthvader and @Scobleizer was also first followed by three people.

Another string leads to @ev, who does not lead back to @jack. @ev descendents include a lot of new media players. One string leads out of @macworld and has quite a diverse set of followers.

Some people first followed each other such as @kmakice and @amakice and @sheilamc7 and @mdhelfenbein. Both, I believe, are husband/wife pairs.

Most of the strings start off with someone that I’m following and I suspect that if other people did similar graphing, their results might be a bit different. I should also note that this was all done in a fairly manual process. If I had the time I could easily envision building an automated map generator, but I got enough information from this little exercise.

If you’re interested in expanding the map, send me any pairings that you have. Ideally, send it in Graphviz’s directed graph format, e.g.

ahynes1 -> etoile
etoile -> gomer43
gomer43 -> superaleja