Facebook users are found throughout the Philippines

The Philippines has a higher density of Facebook users than many Southeast Asian countries, and Filipino Facebook users seem evenly distributed across the country, according to an infographic released by a Facebook engineer on Tuesday. The graphic shows the connections between Facebook's 500 million users, with white dots representing users' current cities and blue lines representing friendships between people in those cities.

A closeup of the Facebook infographic, with white dots representing cities in users' profiles and blue lines representing connections between cities. Click on the picture to see the full infographic. Source: Facebook

Paul Butler, an intern with Facebook's engineering team, created the visualization because he wanted to see what Facebook data had to say about the interconnections between people in various cities around the world. "I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. I wanted a visualization that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them," Butler said on the Facebook blog. Immediately apparent in Butler's work is the fact that more cities in the Philippines are represented in Facebook than are cities in other countries in Southeast Asia. The outline of the Philippines is clearly visible in the graphic, whereas large parts of India, Indonesia, and Australia — as well as most of China — are not represented. The unrepresented regions may be attributed to either geographical reasons — such as the low population density in Australia — or technological reasons — such as the popularity of local social networks over Facebook in particular countries, like VKontakte in Russia; CyWorld in South Korea; and RenRen in China. Although not fully comprehensive, the infographic does corroborate earlier reports that the Philippines has the sixth largest population of Facebook users in the world and the world's fifth heaviest social network usage. "Visualizing data is like photography. Instead of starting with a blank canvas, you manipulate the lens used to present the data from a certain angle," Butler explained. "It's not just a pretty picture, it's a reaffirmation of the impact [of Facebook] in connecting people, even across oceans and borders," he concluded. — VS, GMANews.TV