Networks

My sister came to visit this week and one of the places I showed her around was the Media Lab. She was curious about the display near the front door, which I had never really investigated. We ended up spending half an hour playing with it. It’s called Immersion, and it’s online as of today.

It visualizes your inbox, letting you see the networks of your connections and classifying them into groups based on, presumably, who gets cc’d into emails. As far as I can tell, it’s pretty accurate. In the image below, it successfully groups my family, my college friends, my housemates, and the local free software community pretty distinctly, along with a big purple cloud I would label “miscellaneous Boston-area friends with whom I play board games and/or have spontaneous dance parties”.

It’s pretty heartwarming to see all those connections between people. It’s also cool to see how the connections change over time. You can see friendships and relationships grow and disappear. Brief communities arising around transient events. On my sister’s map you can see her now-husband slowly shift from her “college friends” group to the “family” group.

My favorite thing is definitely how it lists my sister as “introduced by” my mom. Truer than you know, Immersion algorithm. Truer than you know.

There are some missteps along the way but all in all it’s pretty impressive - and very addicting. I recommend it, and if you’re worried about giving out your data you can always delete your profile once you’re done.