My Facebook Social Network

Last year, Coursera offered a Social Network Analysis course where the instructor is one of the Computational Social Scientist of Facebook, Lada Adamic. Too bad I did not finish this course because it overlapped with another course I was finishing. When this course is offered again, I will definitely complete this since I have to visualize more graphs that deals with the network of textual data using association rule learning.

So here’s my Facebook social network. I wanted to mine more information about my friends but after Facebook retired Oauth 1.0, it really restricted a lot of information that you can mine from your friends. I guess that’s a good thing because of privacy information concerns. So I can only mine the network map though I found a way to mine my textual posts through the archive feature but I have to build some program, maybe in C++ or Python, to extract the data properly.

The size of each label is based on the mixed degree, meaning our mutual friends. The colors of each line the intensity, the purple being the highest, green is middle and blue is the least.

It is fun to see how my friends (nodes) are clustered together based on their distance of connectivity and how each single friend can be interconnected with two clusters, putting their spot in between as it is the average distance between two clusters.

This is not really a particular big network, consisting of 2,500+ nodes (friends) and 55,000+ edges (how each node is connected). Although with a pretty decent PC running at 8GB RAM, Gephi was already performing slow in running ForceAtlas 2.

See the upper left sub giant network? I probably need to clean up my friends list because they do not make sense. These are my Facebook friends who are closely related to each other by using the recommended friend list of Facebook – a behavioral pattern where a group of men who looks at the stance of your half-naked pictures.

I wonder if there’s any platform where I can upload my big network so you can interactively see the nodes and labels.

Facebook Data Visualization

One of the key providers of Big Data is social media and if you know me personally, I am very active on these sites especially Facebook. Normally, I would use Wolfram Alpha to conduct simple regression and mathematical operations where Excel could not handle without using any statistical software until I was forced to learn R language (by the way, if you have time, make time to learn this language – it is very cool).

Anyway, today, I spent my workday learning how to use RapidMiner to do simple text analytics and converting it to a sensible Sentiments Analysis using customer feedback from surveys. As far as my self-training goes, I have just reached progressed of making a vector count of most frequently used words yet I have not created any graphs nor even a simple word cloud. Tell you, becoming a data scientist is really challenging.

Back to my post – Wolfram Alpha offers a free report generation of the basics of your Facebook profile. If you have any questions in interpreting some of these charts, you can ask me or you can always count on Google.

Facebook Activity

Friends Stats

Friend Network

Get yours at http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=facebook+report

Megan Young and Devina DeDiva

The moment I saw her post shared by my friend on Facebook, the rush from my chest to my norepinephrine receptors were awaken, swarming my brain if I should be on fight, flight or freeze mode; and yet, I fought.

Megan Young and Devina DeDiva

It is very uncalled for someone calling ‘someone’ a toiler cleaner especially when you generalize a particular race. Racism is not so in in this generation, girl. You will get hate exponentially compared what you wrote on your timeline.

By the time of this writing, her post was taken down or she deleted it, who hell cares? Nevertheless, the screenshot prevails and I can be, Filipinos can be, if you must say, revengeful and demeaning when you degrade our proud race.

Congratulations! You are an overnight celebrity!

Instagram May Use Your Photo

Instagram

Instagram has always been close to my heart in terms of photo sharing because it is very flexible, mobile and offers a lot of a few good filters. Besides, some people post their faces on IG because they look better in non-HD format. Haha.

I never had the explore the wonders of Instagram when it was starting because I gave up on my iPhone 3G a few years ago. The processor was too slow and when I held my hands on Android, I fell in love with it instantly. Too bad that Instagram was only offered to Android users recently.

With much enthusiasm in mobile photography, I think I have captured more than 1,300 photos to date and it is expected to reach 1,500 before the year ends. That’s how much I take photos!

On the other hand, with the recent acquisition of Facebook, Instagram released a new set of privacy policy which stirred some online controversy. Why are people disturbed by this? Should you be concerned?

The new policy will start on January 16 of 2013. If you don’t delete your account before that date, Instagram can use your photo and will have the rights to yours in perpetuity – Instagram does not claim your photos but you are agreed that you give them rights to yours. All other legal stuff are posted on their legal page – read further.

For a normal person, I don’t think I would mind regardless if I am not paid for this. But there are sensitive privacy issues that may arise if your personal photo is used for public.

PS, this will only apply to the photos posted when the policy is in effect.