Social networking services make it easy to keep in touch with friends and family, whether across the street or across the world. An app created by The Economist shows our international Facebook connections mirror those of the old European empires.
The app uses data provider by Facebook to show connections from four old empires: the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and Portugal. The app shows the Facebook connections users in those countries have with other nations, with a map of the countries which used to be part of their respective empires. Here’s a map of Facebook connections from the U.K. versus the countries that used to be British colonies:
If you pay any attention at all, you’ll notice there’s a high degree of correlation between Facebook connections and the countries that were former colonies. This is probably due to shared languages. If Portuguese is your main language, you’ll probably have more in common with someone from Brazil (where Portuguese is the official language and a former colony of Portugal) than the U.S.
We also covered Facebook’s redesign of their photo viewer. If for some reason you’re reading this and somehow haven’t moved your business into social media, an infographic might be just the thing to convince you to do so.
