I was unable to use Gephi on OSX, despite numerous attempts and tweaks.  I'll continue to work on it to figure out a solution, as others have apparently been able to run it just fine. I tried a number of other software (nodebox, cytoscape), but was frustrated by either the lack of interesting, literary datasets and the multitude of different file formats used to encode the datasets. Pretty nightmarish. A tool that was nice for the construction of a simple visualization was Google Fusion Tables, a tool that is still regarded as in the "lab", but is already quite powerful and functional.  Anyway, just for the sake of trying out a social network visualization I grabbed a dataset from an actual social network (youtube), and popped in some data.  The nodes are different youtube users, and the edges are connections ("subscriptions", I think youtube calls them?).  I could only use a limited chunk of my dataset because when I tried the whole thing the loading box gave me the impression it would take about a week to process the data.  So I grabbed about 14k. Suffice it to say this is not what I envisioned making when I first began thinking about this assignment, but I had to make something.  So it goes.