Book Image

Python Social Media Analytics

By : Baihaqi Siregar, Siddhartha Chatterjee, Michal Krystyanczuk
Book Image

Python Social Media Analytics

By: Baihaqi Siregar, Siddhartha Chatterjee, Michal Krystyanczuk

Overview of this book

Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Forums, Pinterest, and YouTube have become part of everyday life in a big way. However, these complex and noisy data streams pose a potent challenge to everyone when it comes to harnessing them properly and benefiting from them. This book will introduce you to the concept of social media analytics, and how you can leverage its capabilities to empower your business. Right from acquiring data from various social networking sources such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and social forums, you will see how to clean data and make it ready for analytical operations using various Python APIs. This book explains how to structure the clean data obtained and store in MongoDB using PyMongo. You will also perform web scraping and visualize data using Scrappy and Beautifulsoup. Finally, you will be introduced to different techniques to perform analytics at scale for your social data on the cloud, using Python and Spark. By the end of this book, you will be able to utilize the power of Python to gain valuable insights from social media data and use them to enhance your business processes.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

APIs in a nutshell


An API is the medium that allows the exchange of data points between a service and the programmer or user. API concepts have been widely used in the software industry when we needed different software to exchange data with with another. Mobile and internet applications have been using web services and APIs to enrich information from external sources. Social media also started creating APIs to share their data with third-party application developers. The popularity of data science has made APIs emerge also as a source for mining and knowledge creation. The nature of all social media is different, so are their APIs. The steps involved in making a connection may not differ greatly, but the data points we capture do.

Different types of API

Currently, two types of API are available. They are as follows:

  • RESTful API
  • Stream API

RESTful API

This is the most common type of API that most social media provides. The information from a REST API is static and is from historical data. The...