Cluster your Facebook friends

Last week, I came across two interesting posts by Romain François and Petr Simecek:

• Crawling Facebook with R, in which Romain explains how to connect to the Facebook Graph API
• Mining Facebook Data: Most “Liked” Status and Friendship Network, in which Petr use Romain’s function to visualize your friend’s network.

As coincidence would have it, I also came across an older introductory post about social network analysis (Grey’s Anatomy Network of Sexual Relations) which could actually complement quite well the two posts above.

Using the igraph package, it is very easy to use the Girvan-Newman algorithm to automatically detect your groups/clusters of friends. The code below show how to display the names of your friends on the plot.

Here is the full code to create the chart above: