Relationship Analysis/Visualization

I recently had the need to evaluate a few different social analysis tools for a project. These are tools that visually show relationships between entities. For example, it could show a representation of your friends/connections on Facebook or Linked In. Then you click on a friend and it shows their network and so on. I looked at open source library called JUNG (Java Universal Network/Graph framework) which was pretty nice. There were a few other commercial offerings that looked ok.

But the one that really caught my eye was the BirdEye Relationship Analysis (RaVis). It's written in Flex and it's just flat out cool. It actually made me spend time to think of possible ways to use relationship analysis in applications that really don't need it, just so I could use the tool.

Check out the demo here. Here's the home page for the suite of related tools.