Visualizing Egocentric Social Relationships in Instant Messaging

Instant messaging (IM) allows us to maintain relationships with our social network through messaging and status information. We present early iterations of visualizations of IM interactions that help to visually identify several different types of relationships, such as intimate socials, long-lost-friend, and asymmetric relationships. Our work is motivated by an interest in designing awareness systems that can help reflect or even affect our desired social relationships