In this chapter, we saw how to access many of the social media websites and also discussed the various use cases that could be implemented. The methodology involved in accessing data through the APIs are similar to one another; while most APIs require authentication, some APIs can be accessed without authentication even in a browser. Most APIs provide the data in the JSON format, but for some popular sites there are packages built in R that can convert the data to a data frame while retrieving. This helps in speeding up the analysis. These APIs provide us the data in a variety of formats: structured in some cases, but unstructured in most cases. With a higher limit on the API requests that can be called, the volume at which we can generate data is also quite high.
In this book, we covered the methodologies to access the data from R using the APIs of various social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, GitHub, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Blogger, and a few more networks. This...