I've removed the script and actual data from this page at the request of the Facebook. Apparently scripts like mine have been abused for less than savory purposes, so they asked me (nicely) to take it down. The general overview of the project is still available below.
Anyone thinking of doing a similar project should note that Facebook's terms of service now specifically forbid any automated collection of data, for any purpose.
In May 2005 I wrote a script to collect connection data from the UCSD portion of the Facebook and generate a large graph of friend connections. I then attempted to interpret the graph in a Freshman project for school (UCSD).
The script touched approximately 11,000 accounts, collecting about 669,000 connections. (It took a little over a week, running near-continuously -- though I purposely limited the rate at which it accessed the site.)
The graph created was far too big and densely connected to be directly visualized in the traditional ways. Compressing such a graph into a readily visualizable form, is still an open research topic, and as such was out of the scope of my project. So, I had to satisfy myself with less direct methods such as an adjacency matrix like this.
Copyright © 2001-2009 Michael Kelly.
