The Facebook Graph API

The Facebook Graph API is at the core of the Facebook platform, and it's one the main components that enable the integration of third parties with Facebook. As the name suggests, it offers a consistent graph-like view of data, representing objects and the connections between them. The different platform components allow developers to access Facebook data and integrate Facebook functionalities into third-party applications.

In terms of data mining opportunities, there was a major shift during 2014 with the release of version 2.0 of the API. One of the main objects of interest in data analysis is the social graph, that is, the list of connections (friendship) between users. Since version 2.0 of the Graph API, applications that want to access this information must explicitly ask for the user_friends permission, but the API will only return the list of friends who are also users of the given app.

Effectively, this choice has transformed what used to be a gold mine for data...