Mining the Social Web, 3rd Edition

Chapter 2. Mining Facebook: Analyzing Fan Pages, Examining Friendships, and More

In this chapter, we’ll tap into the Facebook platform through its (Social) Graph API and explore some of the vast possibilities. Facebook is arguably the heart of the social web and is somewhat of an all-in-one wonder, given that more than half of its 2 billion users¹ are active each day updating statuses, posting photos, exchanging messages, chatting in real time, checking in to physical locales, playing games, shopping, and just about anything else you can imagine. From a social web mining standpoint, the wealth of data that Facebook stores about individuals, groups, and products is quite exciting, because Facebook’s clean API presents incredible opportunities to synthesize it into information (the world’s most precious commodity) and glean valuable insights. On the other hand, this great power brings great responsibility and Facebook has instrumented the most sophisticated set of online privacy controls that the world has ever seen in order to help protect its users from exploit.

It’s worth noting that although Facebook is self-proclaimed as a social graph, it’s been steadily transforming into a valuable interest graph as well, because it maintains relationships between people and the things that they’re interested in through its Facebook pages and the ability to indicate reactions (e.g., by clicking “Like”). In this regard, you may increasingly hear it framed as a “social interest graph.” For ...