We got inspired by the work Mike Bostock has been doing with D3, but we wanted to extend it to more of an application interface setting than just charting. It's built on Python/Flask/Heroku.
I would suggest putting the title you have for this Show HN post on the landing page right at the top, since it's hard to know what exactly it is that I'm putting my github username in for.
As for the graph, it's awesome and fun to play with! I found the "close" button on selecting people a bit small to click.
The idea is great! But why all the people I connected to are at the same distance? I'd expect to see closer to my node users with a strong relationship with me
That's a great point. There are a few different physical properties we can tweak which could give us more control over individual nodes. We haven't gotten that far yet, but have been thinking about the possibilities. Check the blog post to see some thoughts on this.
You can fork the project on GitHub here: https://github.com/MattStockton/nodal
Or read more about it here: http://mattstockton.com/2012/11/30/navigating-your-network-g...