Loading the dataset

In this chapter, our task is to recommend users on online social networks based on shared connections. Our logic is that if two users have the same friends, they are highly similar and worth recommending to each other.

We are going to create a small social graph from Twitter using the API we introduced in the previous chapter. The data we are looking for is a subset of users interested in a similar topic (again, the Python programming language) and a list of all of their friends (people they follow). With this data, we will check how similar two users are, based on how many friends they have in common.

Note

There are many other online social networks apart from Twitter. The reason we have chosen Twitter for this experiment is that their API makes it quite easy to get this sort of information. The information is available from other sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, as well. However, getting this information is more difficult.

To start collecting data, set...