In Facebook, friends are represented by nodes and the relationship between friends is represented by links, but we can get a lot more information from it, such as gender, age, post list, likes, political affiliation, religion, and so on, and Facebook provides us with a complete HTTP-based API (Application Programming Interface) to work with its data. Follow this link for more information:
https://developers.facebook.com/
Another interesting option is the Stanford Large Network Dataset Collection, where we can find social network datasets well-formatted and anonymized for educational proposes. Follow this link for more information:
http://snap.stanford.edu/data/
Tip
Using anonymized data, it is possible to determine whether two users have the same affiliations, but not what their individual affiliations represent.
In this chapter, we will use a Facebook graph with 1,274 friends and 43,000 relationships between them. This will help us understand how friends from...