By JudithDonath's Sociable Media group at the MITMediaLab. Relatedly ChatCircles, VisualWho.
Donath, J., Lee, H-Y., Boyd, D., and Goler, J. (2001). Loom2: Intuitively visualizing usenet. in CSCW 2001 (workshop). Available from http://smg.media.mit.edu/papers/danah/CSCW2001PositionPaper.pdf