Challenges
Flickr is one of the longest-standing social networks and it has evolved over the years. Pretty much like Flickr, we have progressed through this book and evolved our methods and techniques across chapters. Flickr presented its own set of challenges and the following is a quick summary of these:
API response objects: Flickr has a nicely documented and updated set of APIs which provide access to most of its publicly usable content. The challenge comes from the design and response of these APIs. While the design of the APIs is something for which Flickr engineers must have put in a lot of thought, they pose difficulties for analytical use cases. It is difficult to use multiple API methods to extract data related to a single entity and so on. On the same lines, the response objects are deeply nested and require some thought and creativity before one can preprocess and use the data for any analysis. Moreover, any changes to the APIs may require extensive rework with regards to extraction...
