Studying Facebook via data extraction

This paper describes Netvizz, a data collection and extraction application that allows researchers to export data in standard file formats from different sections of the Facebook social networking service. Friendship networks, groups, and pages can thus be analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively with regards to demographical, post-demographical, and relational characteristics. The paper provides an overview over analytical directions opened up by the data made available, discusses platform specific aspects of data extraction via the official Application Programming Interface, and briefly engages the difficult ethical considerations attached to this type of research.