I wanted to take an more infographic app...
I wanted to take an more infographic approach to the subject, so I came up with a couple of layout wise quite similar ideas.
The Facebook Headlines Thinking of the concept “social”, the first natural thing to come up with was the Facebook. Social interaction is all about communication, so I started to think the Facebook status view as a constant flow of personal tabloid headlines. I’m curious, how would this days “DailyFacebook” headline page look like. So if technically possible, I would like to tap into the Facebook feed to collect headlines. These headlines would then be sorted by popularity ie. the amount of comments and likes. The more popular a status was, the bigger the headline.
Additionally, because interaction is the core of social communication, it would be interesting to see correlation between statuses. Draw the line between a two statuses, whose author has commented the other, so revealing interaction.
The Surname Cloud While thinking tapping into Facebook could be technically too hard, I thought of an other approach. Social communication is what happens between individuals, and individuals are denoted by name, to be more precise, first name. So I tried to look up for a list of finnish first names and their popularity, but couldn’t find one, so I ended up with a data sheet from Finnish Population Register ( http://www.vaestorekisterikeskus.fi/ ), that listed all the 250 000+ surnames of finnish citizens, and the amount of people carrying that name. I came up with an idea to list all (or at least couple of thousand most common) surnames, and like in Facebook headlines, change the point size according to name prevalence. Additionally the names could be color coded by first letter, so the list could be furthermore dissected into more manageable blocks, and maybe to show correlation between surname and first letter prevalence.