Sharp Ideas

All your social networks are belong to us

Social networking has exploded in 2007 and 2008!

Dot and neato are two utility applications that are bundled with graphviz.  Dot is used for creating directed graphs, neato draws undirected graphs.

Using dot from the command-line couldn’t be easier.  Here’s a simple example:

dot -Tsvg fsm.dot -o fsm.svg

This creates an SVG image of the finite state machine (fsm) defined in the text file fsm.dot.

Using neato is just as easy:

neato -Tsvg fsm.dot -o fsm.svg

Graphviz, an open source application released by AT&T, is a handy tool for automatically creating graphical representations of directions (and undirected) graphs.

This capability is particularly handy when trying to get an understanding of the logical relationships within a social network.

Graphviz is well documented, and includes APIs for extending its use via Java, .NET, Perl, Python, and PHP.

Here’s an interesting article from the technical staff at GFI:

Pod slurping - data security risks on your network

full story: http://www.searchcio.com.au/papers/paper.asp?DocID=20227&SiteID=14