This is quite cool and fun to play with: The Social Network of Second Life Groups, a new web service by Louis Platini of Metaverse Business, a Second Life analytics company that also compiles in-world visitor data, among other useful info.
As the name suggests (and as you can see from the screencap above), Louis' service displays the publicly available data of Second Life groups, and shows their members' connections to other groups, and displays that as interlinking networks.
Above, for example, is the extremely popular group Frank's Jazz VIP, associated with a nightclub of the same name. Connecting that membership to other groups, Louis tells me, reveals some interesting data. For instance, a lot of Frank's tuxedo and ballroom dress-wearing members also like getting nude:
"The upper part shows the network around this group," Louis explains. "All other groups that are linked to Frank's Jazz VIP are shown as balls, where the size of the ball indicates the number of members in the group. The thickness of the line between two balls indicates how closely they are related. When you move with your cursor over the ball, more information is given in a tooltip.
"So what can we say about the related groups of Frank's Jazz VIP? The most related group is Phat Cat's RomantiCats, another place where you can dance. A little surprise is that the second most related group is Naturist Resort - The Wild Coast. It seems that people who go dancing in formal attire also like to dance without any clothes. The next most related groups are again other groups for other places where you can dance."
You can read more about how this system works on Mr. Platini's site here. This data, by the way, is only a significant slice of the whole: "At this moment (June 2011), we have not scanned all Second Life groups. So far, only 20-30% of all SL groups are checked and their relationships were calculated. Note that to determine the relationship of 100,000 groups, you have to make 100,000 * 100,000 = 10 billion comparisons. Today we have discovered more than 300,000 groups. We started this analysis the beginning of the year, and hope to have more than 80% covered by the end of this year. If somebody has some huge (free) processing power at his disposal, please contact us."
Click here to give it a whirl, and tell us about the interesting connections your Second Life groups reveal.
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