Facebook: Get the friends of friends of friends of friends

Steve|munich

Spiderpig, Spiderpig!
Jun 13, 2009
114
2
0
Hi folks,

I'm not so into this social media stuff, so I'll describe the task here.

I plan an application, that needs the social graph between two indiviuals in order to work. The first one is the user of the application, which provides us with access to his facebook account by API. The second is just a random guy or girl on the planet where we have nothing than first name, last name, country.

I need to show the connection between them. Like that:

A -- B -- C -- D

With A beeing our user, D beeing the random person, B beeing a friend of A, C beeing a friend of B, D beeing a friend of C.

Got it?

Ah yes, and I need it in realtime.

What would be your approach? Just crawling every facebook profile and then creating a "map" on a local server?

Budget is ~50k USD, time 1-2 years.

Any suggestions would be appreciated... thanks!

Steve
 


With A beeing our user, D beeing the random person, B beeing a friend of A, C beeing a friend of B, D beeing a friend of C.

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Unless B & C are openly sharing their friends list to the public, this is impossible and you can only figure out the mutual friends of A and D, not connect them via 2 degrees of separation
 
You definitely will need their friend lists or its just impossible. I have seen a site showing exactly the same thing, very oowerful indeed. Not sure if it's worth it to spend that much time and money on a project like this while FB can prolly make it happen within a few days.
 
Country is not always possible, since those shitwads at facebook don't have a complete country database, and therefore their users can't even set their current location outside the states (most of the time).

I have about $50k worth of graph data...
 
There is a better way of doing this and I think I know what you are doing. Ive done some serious research on this and I dont want to be a cock about this but all I can tell you is that there is a much simpler way and much more advanced way to do it. The simpler way involves pairing facebook friends with 6 degrees of separation and the advanced way yields common interests etc. Research at freelancer for some ideas. All the best.