What a small world
I love asking someone I just met, whose hometown or university or company is the same as a friend, “Do you know ____?” The name game. I am constantly reminded how small the world is. It’s so cool that a friend can be one or two degrees away from another friend, from a completely different part of my life.
I assume that this phonemonan is very common, but I only realize it rarely after pulling a loose thread in a conversation.
I scraped my Instagram social graph, to find as many of these connections as possible. (I think I keep Instagram more intimate than the average person. My gauge for if I follow someone is “If I saw them at the grocery store, would I stop and talk to them for awhile?”)
I got a list of my following and followers pretty easily, using this script, and threw out brand accounts. That left 233 people. I labeled where I met each person. Then, I scraped each one of their following lists, for a grand total of 217,723 relationships. I dumped all of this into a SQL database.
There’s lots of things I can now do with this data!
First, I wanted to visualize all of the relationships between my friends.
Each node is a person, and a line between them is a mutual following. Each color signifies where I met that person. As you probably guessed, I am the node in the center.
It clumps together pretty naturally! There’s not a whole lot of overlap between my SF/NY, college, and high school friends, but there are a couple nodes (“ambassadors”) who are on the edge of a clump and have connections with lots of colors.
Then, I wrote a SQL query to play the name game for me. Specifically, I was looking for accounts that I don’t follow, and that are followed by two of my friends, each friend from a different part of my life.
In the results, there were a ton of celebrity and brand accounts, and I neglected to also scrape the follower count, which would have helped me filter that out. So I had to manually go through the data by hand.
I found 10 of these relationships! Many of these people went to high school with people from my college, or college with people from my high school. There were a handful of amusing ones, and bear with me, as these are a mouthful:
- A friend I met on a cycling trip in California went to summer camp in Massacheusetts with a guy who goes to college in upstate New York with my friend who ran cross country with me in high school
- My childhood next-door neighbor in upstate New York met a girl at a party in Boston, who went to the same high school in Pennsylvania as my San Francisco friend
- A guy I had many classes with in an upstate New York high school, his college ex-girlfriend’s sister’s high school friend had many college classes with me in New York City