Hi Nicholas I don't know how it's being sampled, but I did write some thoughts/bullet points about risks/potentials of such a tool a while ago http://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/knight/2013/01/evaluating-facebook-graph-search -as-an-epistemic-tool/ which included a link to Brian Kelly's post on its potential for research developments (how universities might use it for example). Given the social, and economic factors potentially involved as graph search develops I'm not sure I'd use it as a reliable/valid indicator of taste. Be interested to see if anyone has already done some work on it/is planning to. Cheers Simon @sjgknight <http://twitter.com/sjgknight> ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 11:19:17 +0300 From: Nicholas John <n.john@huji.ac.il> To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: [Air-L] Issues with Facebook's "graph search"? Message-ID: <CAN=3fvoqFcphRUUJGmB8oRTpGYsw9DH5-MTAy9JUAfE_z10tmw@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Hi all, I've just been messing about a bit with Facebook's graph search. According to it, the music liked by people who like Obama is different from the music liked by people who like Romney. Who'd have thunk it? (Richard Rogers<http://www.govcom.org/publications/full_list/rogers_post-demographics _22Feb2009_withimages.pdf>did this with Obama, McCain and MySpace using ElFriendo, so he at the very least already did.) But does anyone here actually know anything concrete about graph search and its reliability and validity as a measurer of taste? Does anyone know how Facebook is doing it? Is it sampling friends of Obama, or actually looking at all of them and then showing me what music they like? Obviously I'm not about to launch a huge research project based on results from Facebook's graph search, or even a small one for that matter, but perhaps we could think a bit about whether it might have any use for us as researchers at all, Nik ____________ Nicholas John<https://sites.google.com/site/smarthuji/people/faculty/dr-nicholas-john

Assistant Professor Department of Communication, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Tel: +972-54-7906073 @nicholasajohn