Malinka Ivanova who is a lecturer at the Technical University of Sofia, has written a great [1] post about social software and its presentation. She mentions different tools for representing data found in social sites such as del.icio.us with a tool from Joris Klerkx at [2] Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. This is the result of using the Java applet tool, when I added myself and it auto added my network, using a search on the tags 3D and virtual worlds:

There is also a Social Circles [3] tool from Maramushi to reveal some of the social networks emerging from mailing lists; this can be very useful if you subscribe to a number of mailing lists and want an overview. I didn’t get my own list at the first attempt but going to try again later.

If there is a way that you can create a dynamic ‘mashup’ as a visual representation of relationships from a variety of social networks that you use, that would be great to have, provided you can amend it on the front end, e.g. if one of your relationships changes such as following or stopping following someone on Twitter, it would be useful to click on it and delete/add relationship - and the data is then transferred back to Twitter, without you needing to log into Twitter separately. Tony Karrer has a [4] post about relationships in social networking and the development of the [5] Social Graph API

It also needs relevant coding to filter out irrelevant results so that your graph is not unmanageable to look at (without 3D glasses !)

[6] SearchCrystal has started to look at ways of visualising data but has separate tabs for images or mashups, so you can’t see text and images on the same visual ‘graph’ but the tabs are quick and easy to use. I do not have the ability to be able to code an application to do this, but I do have ideas about what I would like to see on it. I am probably starting a project around April to look at this for one of Unis student websites. If anyone knows anyone who is interested in this or has other research in this area, I would love to hear from them.