Graphic Social Networking: Twitter Blocks and Socialistics

I stumbled across a couple of applications that attempt to help visualization of social networks.

Twitter Blocks is an experiemntal application from Twitter, that supports graphical navigation of the intersecting networks within Twitter.

As you move your cursor over the various squares in the app, the adjacent authors of twits in the various streams are displayed. A cool way to wander over your friends networks, looking for interesting people. This one is very helpful.

The other, however, leaves a lot to be desired... or perhapps cleaned up in future releases. Socialistics is a Facebook app that graphical represents various sorts of social network metrics, like popularity, as in this graphic:

But much of the app is incomplete, or buggy, as I found when trying to run this view:

A picture is worth a thousand words, but it depends both on the picture and the words involved.