As if there aren’t enough ways to waste hours on the internet, I stumbled on yet another.
(Microsoft owns it, and you need Silverlight for it to work)
Pop in a name in the search bar, and you get a lovely graphical representation of that person’s web connections.
Here’s what they SAY it is:
EntityCube is a research prototype for exploring object-level search technologies, which automatically summarizes the Web for entities (such as people, locations and organizations) with a modest web presence.
As you might expect from THAT description, the results are pretty blah – lots of text.
BUT.
In the left hand sidebar, you’ll see a lovely little graphic and link to a Guanxi graphic.
What IT does though, is place you visually at the centre of your own little universe with your connections circling around.
How utterly wonderful.
Once you start playing with it, its just like a bag of Old Dutch chips – you can’t put it down.
There’s also a Six Degrees feature – put in two names and it’ll show how how they are (theoretically) connected.