spreading jam

Bloom have put together an interesting way of visualizing your social network; your most ‘active’ contacts are represented as clustered bubbles within a circle, with smaller contacts represented as single bubbles – a bubble bath infographic, if you will. (Let’s face it – the bubble colours do remind us of having a bath.) As those of your contacts with the louder voices (read: prone to spamming your feed) are represented as larger bubbles, it’s no surprise that Brands feature heavily in this area, whether this is a positive or a negative, would depend entirely on the brand. What the infographic doesn’t cover is how many interactions each post received, so it’s not entirely clear whether these ‘loud voices’ are an actual influence in your social circle.

What I’d really like to see is how many people are actually positively contributing to my social experience. Who I should avoid? (Frequent moaners.) Who’s REALLY in my social network? (My real friends?) And of course, those passive ‘friends’ who merely contribute to the numbers, and don’t actually interact with the social network, who are they? (Maybe their spatial relationship and colour indicate this, but the application certainly isn’t spilling the beans on how it generates each infographic, apart from the obvious frequency mechanic.)

All in all, however, it’s a nice little piece of graphic from Bloom that shows us in an instant who’s got the loudest – not necessarily the most interesting – voice, and could challenge brands to ‘fit in’ and try for a smaller bubble size…Absolute Radio, I’m looking at you here.