PieSpy: Graphing IRC Social Networks

June 10th, 2006

Piespy is a nice program which graphs social networks in IRC. I’ve seen a couple of graphs which were generated from IRC channels on the irc.neondragon.net server and they look pretty good.

An IRC bot is used to monitor a channel and perform a heuristic analysis of events to create a mathematical approximation of the social network. From this, the bot can produce a visualization of the inferred social network on demand. These visualizations reveal the structure of the social network, highlighting connectivity, clustering and strengths of relationships between users. Animated output allows viewers to see the evolution of the social network over time.

It tries to determine relationships between users and the strength of the relationships (indicated using the weight of the lines between the nodes). It takes various things into account including direct addressing of users, time between messages and density.

It’s open source and released under the GPL so could be well worth running on your own IRC network or community. See the PieSpy page for some example output graphs.