Chapter 5. Topic Analysis on Google+
This chapter focuses on Google+ (sometimes called Google Plus or simply G+), one of the most recent big players to join the social network arena. Launched in 2011, it is described as "a social layer across all of Google's services" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B). It experienced an extremely rapid growth in its user base, with 10 million users after its first two weeks. After a number of redesigns, towards the end of 2015, Google revealed their larger focus on communities and collections, moving the service towards interest-based networking.
In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics:
- How to interact with the Google+ API with the help of Python
- How to search for people or pages on Google+
- How to use the web framework, Flask, to visualize search results in a web GUI
- How to process content from a user's post to extract interesting keywords
