Yup, I worked at friendster. Here's some tidbits.

I was responsible for "social graph" which told how many degrees of separation there are between two people and people are connected. I never had much opportunity to really explore the dataset (boo!) however I did discover a few things.

• Six degrees of separation is really true. On average any two people in Friendster graph were connected by 6 hops. it was almost a perfect bell curve, which surprised me.
• There were lots of "orphans" (no friends) and small "islands" or 2 or 3 people were connected to each other, but not connected to anyone else. What was surprising was one island of 118 people. Looking into it, there were all from a rural(?) Finnish college. It didn't look like it was intentional but somehow, they never connected to the outside 'world'.

I actually got the job at friendster by sending in "Friend Explorer" which was a java applet (remember those?) roughly based on the TouchGraph (?) code. Johnathan Abrams called me up a week later and told me Friendster was going to sue since I hacked their site. Ha ha. He was joking, but it eventually ended up with me moving to SF to work there. I believe Wired magazine used a screen shot. The dork in the center is me.

This never got released since, well, there were a few, ahem, performance problems, that need to be worked on before adding candy to the site. I thought I lost the code, but I just found it on old CD. Here's some old screenshots. Once I get it to recompile, maybe I'll repost it.