At Vanguard, we’re trying to figure out the best ways to visually model the incredibly complex webs of relationships between financial institutions, people, and the various ways the money is organized. I wish we could do something along these lines (see below) but I doubt anything like this is mature enough for us to use at this point… Currently all the CRM applications available model this synaptic, organic chaos of connections in a flat hierarchy, like the folding drop-down lists in Windows Explorer (not the file browser in Windows). It’s barely adequate, and possibly even detrimental, because it can trick you into thinking you’re seeing everything important when something essential might be two or three levels down and you might miss it.

Vizster: Visualizing Online Social Networks

Vizster is an interactive visualization tool for online social networks, allowing exploration of the community structure of social networking services such as friendster.com [4], tribe.net [12], and orkut [10]. Such services provide means by which users can publicly articulate their mutual “friendship” in the form of friendship links, forming an undirected graph in which users are the nodes and friendship links are the edges.