16 October 2012 6 Comments

Face Harvesting: Download your Facebook data for External Reporting and Visualization

I’m always on the lookout for cool new data feeds that I can mess with – as you can clearly see from some of the other posts on this site. Usually it involves some scripting, screen-scraping, system fiddling, and general madness – basically meaning that some people can get it to work, while others cannot. […]

5 July 2012 18 Comments

How to Harvest Facebook updates with Python, MySQL or SQL Server

Data Party! Most people focus on search.twitter.com (or automated pulls from their API) for data collection regarding the “pulse” on a particular topic or brand – they often overlook the fact that the public Facebook timeline can be a useful source of data as well. I’ll show you how to harvest it and store it in a database of your choosing for later analysis.