James Spahr has created a way to automatically make maps of social networks (or indeed, any large data set made of nodes and pointers) using the Mac OS X graphic tool OmniGraffle, then creating an AppleScript to call the Google API for the input data.

Here is a piece of a much larger map of 3 degrees of separation from the "Bacon Brother's" website

I wrestled with whether to post this, as it is OS and app and scripting-language dependent, but I invoke the LazyWeb to create the Perl-and-GD Library or Python-and-GIMP or Java-Grappa version of same.

Thanks to Alex Rainert for the pointer.