Facebook

Facebook provides three APIs for different purposes:

• Atlas API: API for partners and advertisers
• Graph API: The primary way for apps to read and write to the Facebook social graph
• Marketing API: To build solutions for marketing automation with Facebook's advertising platform

In our data mining exercise will only focus on Graph API, which gives us access to our point of interest, which is the content posted by users: comments, shares, likes, photos, and so on. It is the primary way to collect data from Facebook platform using requests to query data. It also enables the automation of all the actions available on Facebook such as data uploads (photos or videos), likes, shares, and account management, among others. However, our focus is on data collection and not on account management.

The name Graph API is related to the structure of the platform, which in fact represents a social graph composed of:

• Nodes: All the main elements such as user, photo, page, and comment
• Edges: Relationships between nodes such as user photos and comments in posts
• Fields: Attributes that these nodes or edges can have such as location, name, birthday date, time, and so on