Friend Wheel - History

The Facebook development platform was released in May 2007 while I was just completing my first year at University. Shortly after exams finished, at the start of June, I had a week of celebrating and freedom. I took a look at Facebook Applications and came up with the idea for Friend Wheel. Originally it was supposed to look something like this, but in Facebook, most people are linked to dozens of others and the maps became very complicated.
A wheel layout seemed to work much better. After putting in an algorithm to try to encourage people who were friends to be grouped together, Friend wheel was launched.

Over the following few weeks, many features and improvements were made, many of which thanks to Tim Halbert who helped test the application with larger numbers of friends, and helped considerably with the design and look of the wheel.
The rainbow wheel, a better (or at least, different) grouping algorithm, and the ability to select which friends were shown were all added over the next few weeks of summer.
The interactive flash wheel was added, firstly because so many people wanted to be able to move nodes around and zoom in for a closer look at parts of the wheel, and secondly because having it made interactive is cool!

At the time of writing, 31st August 2007, Friend Wheel has 365,000 users and is still growing significantly. Around 25,000 wheels are generated each day. I have a few ideas for improving Friend Wheel further, so stay tuned and wish it luck for the future!

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