[badusername]

I think the study is trying to link two quite unrelated aspects through a narrow lens of anonymized "international" friendship links. What constitutes international? Is any link outside of your own country considered international?

To me, this chart seems to highlight countries that have relatively open borders with its neighbors, or countries where immigrants as percentage of population is high because of economic opportunities and such. Consider Saudi Arabia or Oman, which gets a lot of immigrants from all over the Muslim world, which seems to be one of the most "international" countries. This inference seems counter to the fact that many of those countries are not as open to international businesses as say, Singapore or Hong Kong. Nor are they poor countries per se.

[danso]

I couldn't find anything in the study that shows how friendship is defined within in anonymized data set:

> Facebook provided data on every friendship formed in 2011 in every country in the world at the national aggregate level. These data set included a total of 57,457,192,520 friendships.

So there's a few problems with language here...one of them being...what does "every friendship formed in 2011" mean? The friendship was actually made in 2011? Or that the friendship record existed as of the 2011 snapshot of the database? I'd have to imagine the former but if it's just the latter...then "friendships made by all users in one given year" is massively different than "all friendships of all users".

Second, in 2011, FB's interface was different than it is today. Maybe they've always had this data in the backend...but were users able to have multiple locations listed as part of their user profile in 2011? My hazy recollection is that you were able to list your location...and after the Dec. 2011 roll out of Timeline [1], then you started being much more granular about your life and location, because Facebook wants to be the yearbook of your life or something.

If we assume that an international friendship is made by two users who have locations in two different countries...OK...well, anecdotally speaking, I went to a Midwest college..we didn't have FB at the time but I imagine if we did, most/many students would have put the university as their current location/network. Even though the number of international friends I had substantially increased, if the data isn't captured at a granular level, it just looks like I made friends with a whole bunch more midwesterners.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/timeline-now-availab...