December 2010 - Monty Metzger Digital FutureMonty Metzger Digital Future

Visualizing Global Friendship of facebook’s 500+ million users

Posted by Monty Metzger / facebook future trends, Trends infographic

A facebook intern created a visualized view of friendship on facebook on a global level. The result is this impressive image, visualizing the friend-relations of more than 500 million facebook users. It is interesting how we are connected, but also where are the main gaps where facebook is not present at all. Well done.

View High Resolution.

Description of the project on Facebook:
Visualizing data is like photography. Instead of starting with a blank canvas, you manipulate the lens used to present the data from a certain angle.

When the data is the social graph of 500 million people, there are a lot of lenses through which you can view it. One that piqued my curiosity was the locality of friendship. I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. I wanted a visualization that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them.

I began by taking a sample of about ten million pairs of friends from Apache Hive, our data warehouse. I combined that data with each user’s current city and summed the number of friends between each pair of cities. Then I merged the data with the longitude and latitude of each city.
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Continue Reading..

13
Dec

My facebook profile art

Posted by Monty Metzger / facebook future trends

The new profile page of facebook offers a lot of new opportunities. Here is my first facebook art for my profile: http://www.facebook.com/montymetzger

Here you can find a PSD file to set up your profile.

08
Dec

Cyber-Thefts steal carbon certificates worth 15 Mio Euro

Posted by Monty Metzger / Articles & Press

If you read this, you know why you are (or should be) investing in security and firewalls at your company.
Hackers have been accessing Romanian National Registry for Greenhouse Gases and have stolen Holcim’s carbon certificates worth 15 million Euro ($20 million US Dollar). Holcim is one of the biggest cement companies with yearly revenues of approx. 24 billion Euro.

Here is the official statement from Holcim:

On November 16, 2010, Holcim Romania’s CO2 accounts held within the Romanian National Registry for Greenhouse Gases were illegally accessed. Unknown persons have stolen 1.6 million CO2 certificates of which 600,000 could be recuperated and returned to Holcim to date. The outstanding allowances correspond to a financial value of approximately EUR 15 million.

One million CO2 allowances were transferred to an account in Liechtenstein. Another 600,000 CO2 allowances were transferred to a company in Italy, which has account registries in Italy and the UK. Parts seem to have been further transferred to accounts in the Czech Republic, Great Britain and France.

Holcim Romania immediately informed the Romanian Registry requesting blockage and recuperation of its CO2 allowances and to secure data. Formal criminal investigations have been requested from the relevant Romanian law enforcement authorities. An international investigation has been initiated.

As CO2 allowances are electronically registered and cannot leave the Registry systems, Holcim has asked the European Commission’s support in requesting the National CO2 Registries to trace and prevent the further trading and dissemination of the stolen allowances.