If you’re a member of the popular social network websites like twitter, Hi-5, or Facebook then you might have experienced coming across an old school friend, who only found you because they were introduced to a friend at a party and added them to their facebook account, after which your name popped up in a comment, so it turns out they knew you. Confused?

 Social networks like face books have allowed us to interact and make links with one another in the most abstract of ways; for example I have found and befriended 7 people with the same name as me and it turns out 4 of them lived in the same town at some point in their lives. It may not sound very ground breaking, but information like this could be used by anthropologists and economists to research abstract links and get a clearer picture of life on this planet.

Peter Warden set out to do something very similar; he used publicly available crawling software to collect freely available information from facebook user accounts, then complied this in visual charts showing links between people that you otherwise wouldn’t know existed.

Unfortunately facebook hasn’t taken his actions lightly and has threatened to sue Mr Warden unless he deletes all of the data that he has built up. He had apparently broken a terms of service rule that he agreed to when signing up for facebook. Not having enough money he wiped all the data from his system and gave up without a fight.