Hi Karen,

Facebook introduced a new system to protect privacy. This blocks much of the data that Facebook Report needs. See this blog post. I guess that it stopped working...

Cheers,

Marco

Hi,

I do not have a Facebook account so I am not really sure what you would see but in the blog it says:

You’ll still be able to generate an analysis of most of your own activity on Facebook, but you won’t have access to any information about your friends (except their names) unless they’ve also authorized our Facebook app. So in most cases, we won’t have enough data to generate a meaningful friend network graph, or to compute statistics about location, age, marital status, or other personal characteristics of your group of Facebook friends.

I suppose that this means that you can see when you post and what you speak about but you will also have problems getting an interesting friendship graph, because the algorithm would need the links (friendships) among your friends. Same goes for location, age etc. So, I think that the post suggests that the output will be very limited, because much of it depends on data you will not have access to anymore.

Basically, it will not work anymore unless all of your friends have authorised the Facebook app.

Best wishes from Aberdeen,

Marco

Hi Karen,

I do not know how important it is for your project to use your own Facebook data, as opposed to someone else's. There is a website that contains large data sets, including some of Facebook. In a certain sense that might be even more useful than your own data, because it might be more representative. If you download the Facebook data from that website you can import and plot it like so:

Graph[#[[1]] -> #[[2]] & /@ (Flatten[StringSplit[#, " "], 2] & /@ Import["~/Desktop/facebook_combined.txt", "TSV"])]

(You might have to adapt the path to the file.) You can also identify communities, but the following command will run a couple of minutes:

CommunityGraphPlot[#[[1]] -> #[[2]] & /@ (Flatten[StringSplit[#, " "],2] & /@ Import["~/Desktop/facebook_combined.txt", "TSV"])]

Once you have the graph you can of course use Mathematica's rich functionality of graph analytics. By the way, if you do not want to save the file on your hard drive, you can also use the file from the Internet directly:

Graph[#[[1]] -> #[[2]] & /@ (Flatten[StringSplit[#, " "], 2] & /@ Import["https://snap.stanford.edu/data/facebook_combined.txt.gz", "TSV"])]

and

CommunityGraphPlot[#[[1]] -> #[[2]] & /@ (Flatten[StringSplit[#, " "],2] & /@ Import["https://snap.stanford.edu/data/facebook_combined.txt.gz", "TSV"])]

What I am trying to say is that even if the Facebook API does not work as before, there are fantastic data sets out there that you might work on. Mathematica offers all the tools to import the data and analyse it. In the Stanford website you find for example data from Google circles, that contains many more nodes and edges.

There are also really interesting posts by Stephen Wolfram such as Data Science of the Facebook World.

I am not sure if this helps,

Marco