Accessing Facebook data
You will find a lot of content in several books and on the web about various techniques to access and retrieve data from Facebook. There are several official ways of doing this, which include using the Facebook Graph API either directly through low level HTTP
based calls or indirectly through higher level abstract interfaces belonging to libraries like Rfacebook
.
Note
Some alternative ways of retrieving Facebook data would be to use registered applications on Facebook like Netvizz or the GetNet applications built by Lada Adamic, used in her very popular Social Network Analysis course. (Unfortunately http://snacourse.com/getnet
has not worked since Facebook completely changed its API access permissions and privacy settings).
Unofficial ways include techniques like web scraping and crawling to extract data. Do note though that Facebook considers this to be a violation of its terms and conditions of accessing data and you should try and avoid crawling Facebook for data...