Interactive 3D Graphs for Web - based Social Networking Platforms

Abstract

Social networking platforms (SNPs) are meant to reflect the social relationships of their users. Users typically enter very personal information and should get useful feedback about their social network. They should indeed be empowered to exploit the information they have entered. In reality, however, most SNPs actually hide the structure of the user’s rich social network behind very restricted text-based user interfaces and large parts of the potential information which could be extracted from the entered data lies fallow. This article presents results from a user study showing that 3D visualizations of social graphs can be utilized more effectively – and moreover – are preferred by users compared to traditional text-based interfaces. Subsequently, the article addresses the problem of how to deploy interactive 3D graphical interfaces to large user communities. This is demonstrated on the social graph application FriendGraph3D for Facebook.