Nexus friend grapher

Following an announcement on Sept 30 2009, Nexus friend grapher shut down permanently on Oct 7 2009. We had many users, and we thank them for talking about Nexus.

Nexus launched in October 2007; a few early testers knew it as Friend Atlas before a friend came up with the better name. Nexus generated over 500,000 friend graphs for 84,000 users. We shut down Nexus because it was devouring disk space, memory, bandwidth, and sysadmin/maintainence time. It was also a niche tool and we didn't really know where to go with it.

Possible alternatives to Nexus

Social Graph, TouchGraph Photos, NameGenWeb (data only), Friend Wheel, Facebook friends Constellation. For Twitter, MentionMap.

Some Nexus friend graphs saved and annotated by users

Spring and radial mode compared

Video of Nexus in action

(Thanks to Max Kiesler for recording it.)

Media/press

Stats

Source code

Nexus source code: Nexus-2009-10-14.tar.bz2 (see MUST-README.txt, DEPLOYMENT.txt files)

Nexus was written using Python and JavaScript in 2007, but the code grew organically and is low quality: there is no test coverage and it is tightly coupled. In 2009, you could get Nexus running in a day or two, but the Facebook API has probably changed too much at this point.

Contact

mailto:[email protected]


Last updated December 18, 2011.