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How to crawl Facebook based on friendship information?

Asked 2010-01-07T19:12:15.380
26

I'm a graduate student whose research is complex network. I am working on a project that involves analyzing connections between Facebook users. Is it possible to write a crawler for Facebook based on friendship information?

I looked around but couldn't find any things useful so far. It seems Facebook isn't fond of such activity. Can I rely on the Facebook API?

Update (Jan-08-2010): Thank you very much for the responses. I guess I probably need to contact Facebook directly then. Cheers

Update (Feb-16-2011): A new book, "Mining the social web", just came out. In it, there is a chapter devoted entirely for mining Facebook using Python. Cheers.

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This lifecode post provide a basic python script to scrape your facebook friends contact info. The output of this script, is the profile ID, profile pame, profile URL, e-mail address and mobile/phone number (if provided by friend). WARNING: This is against Facebook TOS. Use at your own risk. Info provided for educational and research purposes http://ruel.me/blog/2010/11/26/scrape-your-facebook-friends-contact-info-with-python/

answered 2011-01-24T00:58:24.640

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