Palantir: Facebook Hackathon Engineers Create 3-D Visualization of People Connecting

Engineers at a recent Facebook Hackathon event created a pretty cool visualization of how people use Facebook to connect with each other around the world. The model, named Palantir,  utilitizes information from the "social graph" to show the frequency of different types of interactions on the social network by plotting 3-D dots of light that stream outward from the globe. The application is built in Java and actually shows the Facebook activity in real time. Click on the video to the left to see how it works.

Facebook's developer blog describes the Hackathon event the best:

"There are so many great ideas floating around Facebook, but there is never enough time to implement them all. In order to attempt to solve this problem, we engineers throw a Hackathon at Facebook every few months. Hackathon is an all-night-long hack session that gives every Facebook engineer a chance to work on that awesome feature they've been meaning to build for so long. Many of the cool features that you see on the site today were either built during or were started during a Facebook Hackathon."