This chapter introduced some data mining applications using Facebook, one of the big players, if not the main player, in the social media arena.

After discussing some aspects of the Facebook Graph API and its evolution, as well as the implications in terms of data mining, we built a Facebook app that we used to interface with the Facebook platform.

The data mining applications shown in this chapter are related to the profile of an authenticated user and Facebook Pages. We saw how to compute statistics related to the publication habits of the authenticated user and to the interactions of users who follow the updates of a given Page. Using simple aggregation and visualization techniques, this type of analysis can be carried out with a relatively small amount of code. Finally, we used a technique called word cloud to visualize the important keywords, which hopefully represent important topics, from a bunch of published posts.

The focus of the next chapter is Google+, one of the most recent...