Contrary to job board claims, the simple fact is most job opportunities travel through word of mouth, which means they travel along professional and personal relationships. Your social networks determine more than anything else whether you’ll hear about an opportunity.

This week Paul Butler, an intern on Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering team, posted a graph that shows the ties that bind. It’s a data visualization of the friendship relationships between cities. Paul photographed a sampling of our social networks. Righteous.

Why should we care?

Paul’s infographic reminds us of a few things. Opportunities are everywhere, and fortunately it’s as easy as ever to make and maintain relationships everywhere. Weak ties improve your reach. Strong ties improve your references.

Internships don’t have to suck. In fact there are real benefits. Internships are opportunities to show what you can do, to build something or help solve a need. They’re a way for you to try a company out (people, culture, types of work) and a way for a company to try you out. Even though “internship” has a connotation of unpaid and entry-level, it pays to think more broadly about them as lightweight, short-term contract roles for any age and any stage. Perhaps it’s time for a new term.

To learn we need experience and the data from it. Paul not only built something based on skills he had, he built something discoverable which has led to a lot of feedback — data points he can use. Right on Paul.

As Dan Gilbert points out on This Emotional Life, one of the root requirements for happiness is connection with other people. We are not a solo species. And yet one of the dark spots shared by starting a company, working freelance and navigating a professional transition is the swift and surgical removal of a daily flow of social interaction.

Coworking offers an alternative to the social starvation. Like the barcamp movement, coworking recognizes that the expertise you seek is sometimes in the room around you. Coworking spaces allow individuals pursuing their own path to also fill their work life with people.

Free Agent Nation

Over 10 years ago, Daniel Pink wrote a seminal piece in Fast Company that chronicled more and more people beginning to work on their own terms and schedule. The widespread web enabled this shift to start to occur.

By the early 00′s, lightweight, inexpensive tools and web services (e.g. weblogs, wikis, skype) started to kick in to make working remotely even easier. Bootstrapping new companies began finding the best people wherever they lived and happily funded bandwidth instead of office space. For years at Socialtext well over 70% of the company, including myself, lived thousands of miles away from our High Street home in Palo Alto.

With the rise in remote working came the rise of solitude. When Brad Neuberg, Chris Messina and Tara Hunt began promoting coworking a few years back, they gave voice, and a beginning antidote, to working alone. Check out the video for more backstory.

Job Search is Social

One of the most difficult parts of making a professional transition is keeping your social game fresh. Conversation is at the heart of any job and any job search. When you’re working, there’s a constant stream of conversations every day. When you’re in between jobs, the stream can become a trickle.

Consider becoming a member at a coworking space to keep yourself out of the social cave. Most have lite plans where you can go once per week or a few hours per month. The routine of getting up, going to the office and working at a desk can help the search feel more like an explicit project you’re undertaking (which it is). Given how most opportunities come from other people’s networks, you’re likely to meet new people that can help, if not directly meet people who are hiring.

Most importantly, working somewhere consistently, even if on a limited basis, will give you the opportunity to have real conversations with people. This is the most valuable experience of all to keep active.

As Peter Chislett, Deputy Mayor of New Work City says, “it’s not the space, it’s the community. It’s the connection with other people.” I believe it.

Coworking resources

For other coworking spaces, check out:

• Coworking for a global listing

• New Work City

• HubSF

• Hub Berkeley

• The Network Hub in Vancouver

• Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto

• Affinity Lab in DC

• Conjunctured in Austin

• C3/Cambridge Coworking Center

What we found through a variety of analysis is that happiness always spreads person to person, whereas unhappiness only sometimes spreads.

The pass-along rate for happiness not only appears to be higher, it also continues further, spreading up to 3 hops along one’s social network. When there’s good, people tend to spread it. Given 30-50% of our waking hours are spent working, work life has a significant impact on what’s shared. If you’re doing what you love, there’s a greater likelihood you’re boat can lift others, and others may do the same for you.

Aubrey interviews Robert Provine from the University of Maryland who rightly cautions happiness, and mood at large, are often momentary and of course influenced by situational events. Nevertheless, if our days and years are filled with anything, it’s other people and a vast collection of moments. Christakis and Fowler show us one way how the people around us can impact the moments we have, for the better.