Like every complex network, Facebook offers unlimited possibilities of visual representation of the various connections between its users. We've chosen six beautiful visualizations that will awaken the (visual) geek within you.

You don't have to stop at merely watching. Some of the visualizations on the list come with tools that you can use to create beautiful Facebook visualizations of your own with very little effort. Enjoy!

Know of a beautiful Facebook visualization? Let us know in the comments!







This project visualizes all the data Facebook receives, on a global scale. See the Facebook infoverse as it flies around the planet! Unfortunately, it's not freely available for everyone to play with, but the video above is visually stunning enough to make your mouth water.







This wonderful illustration, created by Lee Byron from the Facebook data team, shows how Facebook has evolved from being a social network for universities to the global social networking powerhouse it is today, with over 200 million users.







Friend Wheel is a simple Facebook application that creates a radial graph out of all your Facebook friends. Nexus can do the same thing, but Friend Wheel's results are a tad more colorful. The application also exists for Twitter. Check the FAQ to read about its limitations and instructions on how to update the Wheel to display new friends.







This Java based application lets you see the connections between your Facebook friends, with emphasis on photos; i.e., you can see which friends have taken photos together. This makes this tool actually useful, in addition to being visually appealing. There's another cool feature: interactive tags. Your friend's names in the photos are clickable; click on a friend's name to see them in another photograph.







Still images really don't do justice to this one. It's a Flash web application (it requires access to your Facebook account, but it opens right there on the author's site) which creates a graph of mutual friends between you and one of your Facebook friends. The graph is constantly being updated as new data flows in, and it has a cute wobbly effect while it does it - pure eye candy. The colors on the graph aren't meaningless, either: red means female, blue is male, and green is unknown.







This Facebook add-on used to let you easily create 3D graphical representations of the connections in your Facebook network, with the ability to create various graphs, zoom and pan your graph, and choose between a light and a dark theme. Unfortunately, the plugin is no longer maintained; the official site lists several possible replacements, though.