Think of the social web as a huge town.
Like each town it has central squares, where many road lead. It also has central authorities, which have enough connections to direct you almost everywhere. Finally, like any city it has your friends, acquaintances but also people you hardly know. Depending on who you know (the mayor, a police officer or a salesman), you can get some jobs done much faster, while others require days and days of hard work.
But if you have the right connections and know which roads to follow, the town lies in front of you, like an open book.
The best way to learn your way around this city (and any city) is to have a map of it.
This is a list of static and interactive tools, which will reveal how the town called social web work. The static tools are mostly visuals of well-known social networks. The interactive tools are free software, which will let you study your own social networks.
Purpose of this list is to provide the instruments to help you decode the social web. Maybe if you try a hard enough and read between the lines, you’ll understand how the social web is connected.
Now you have the tools to find who are the hubs in your networks.

Static Tools

Les Miserables: The network of interactions between major characters in the novel Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, divided in 11 communities represented by different colors.

Flickrland: Network analysis of the Flickr population, based on data collected on March 14th, 2005.
Vizster: Vizster is an interactive visualization tool for online social networks, allowing exploration of the community structure of social networking services such as friendster.com, tribe.net, and orkut.
Enron’s email pattern: This graph produced by The New York Times reveals a map of a week’s e-mail patterns in May 2001, when a new name suddenly appeared.
Mapping the new testament: One of hundreds of interesting visualizations in Many Eyes is the Map of social relationships in the New Testament.
Data Visualization of a social network: Different aspects of a real life social network.
The spread of obesity in a large social network: The prevalence of obesity has increased from 23% to 31% over the recent past in the United States, and 66% of adults are overweight. In order to better understand this phenomenon, the authors in this study performed a quantitative analysis of the nature and extent of the person-to-person spread of obesity as a possible factor contributing to the obesity epidemic.

Steroids network in major league baseball: Sen. George Mitchell’s 409-page report on performance-enhancing drugs in baseball describes a thriving underground market for steroids and human growth hormone. This is a visualization of Mitchell’s report.

Interactive Tools

Fidgt: A Social Networking Address Book, which keeps track of all your friends and their media across different social networks (flickr, last.fm, msn messanger and other network supported).
Social Circles: Social Circles intends to partially reveal the social networks that emerge in mailing lists.
LJNet: LJNet is an interactive visualization of LiveJournal.com (LJ) members’ social networks. It shows the friends and friends of friends of any given LJ member.
TouchGraph: Another LiveJournal visualization tool. Now for Facebook too.
Email Constellations: This project aims to be a free, flexible, and easily modifiable visualisation tool that allows a user to intuitively understand their online social group structure.
Tracking the threat: TrackingTheThreat.com is database of open source information about the Al Qaeda terrorist network, developed as a research project of the FMS Advanced Systems Group.
Map of MySpace Friends: This is a simple force-directed graph that maps the relationships between myspace users.
Comment Flow: Building upon a traditional force-directed network layout consisting of nodes (profiles) and edges (friend-links), the system shows the activity and the information exchange (postings in the comment box) between nodes, taking the sequence and age of the messages into account.
Mapping the digg community: Using the Digg API, Brian Shaler created a map of Digg users and how they’re connected to each other.
Facebook friend wheel: colorful wheel that maps all the links between Facebook friends.
Nexus: Nexus is a friend grapher for Facebook built on Graphviz twopi and neato. It calculates friend similarity by parsing profiles (through the Facebook API), and highlights links between friends who share interests and groups.