See Your Facebook Friends' Musical Tastes

A screenshot of the Facebook music visualization in action. Go ahead and explore your friends' tastes in music.

Put together another graph visualization using Facebook as the data source the other day. The previous one showed mutual friendships. This one looks at what music your friends listen to.

The mutual friend visualization is fun to play with but it's hurt by the Facebook terms of use and limitations in its API. The only way to discover a user's friends is to query every single pair of user IDs. If you have 100 friends, this turns into some 5,000 queries which takes quite a while to load. On top of that, the terms of use don't allow caching for more than 24 hours.

End result is, it takes several minutes to load enough information to produce interesting visualizations.

So instead of checking out which of your friends know each other, this visualization shows you what kind of music your friends listen to. It digs into the "Favorite music" field in the profile and throws it into Constellation. It only takes a few seconds to load the data and then you can start browsing friends and artists.

• Check out the Constellation Facebook App

As usual, I'm open to suggestions for improvements!