Ever wonder what happens when a photo goes viral on Facebook?

This is what it looks like.

This dataviz is part of a series of Stamen videos that visualizes a single piece of content being shared between hundreds of thousands of individuals on Facebook. From the company’s Vimeo page:

Each visualization is made up of a series of branches starting from a single person. As the branch grows, re-shares split off on their own arcs, sometimes spawning a new generation of re-shares, sometimes exploding in a short-lived burst of activity. The two different colors show gender, and each successive generation becomes more and more white as time goes by.

Simon Says

APIs from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks can provide really interesting windows into how data evolves. Can you waste time? Sure, but don’t tell me that there’s no value in exploring data. Who knows what you’ll find.