Fun with Facebook in Neo4j by Rik Van Bruggen.
From the post:
Ever since Facebook promoted its “graph search” methodology, lots of people in our industry have been waking up to the fact that graphs are über-cool. Thanks to the powerful query possibilities, people like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and let us not forget, Google have been providing us with some of the most amazing technologies. Specifically, the power of the “social network” is tempting many people to get their feet wet, and to start using graph technology. And they should: graphs are fantastic at storing, querying and exploiting social structures, stored in a graph database.
So how would that really work? I am a curious, “want to know” but “not very technical” kind of guy, and I decided to get my hands dirty (again), and try some of this out by storing my own little part of Facebook – in neo4j. Without programming any kind of production-ready system – because I don’t know how – but with enough real world data to make us see what it would be like.
Rik walks you through obtaining data from Facebook, munging it in a spreadsheet and loading it into Neo4j.
Can’t wait for Facebook graph to support degrees of separation from named individuals, like Edward Snowden.
Complete with the intervening people of course.
What’s privacy compared to a media-driven witch hunt for anyone “connected” to the latest “face” on the TV?
If Facebook does that for Snowden, they should do it for NSA chief, Keith Alexander as well.