Dear Juliano: as Marco mentioned the APIs provided by Facebook will allow you to do some automated caclculations. However, to truly assess who are the "best friends" of Facebook users there is no way around getting their permission to further analyze their profiles. Check our following article for ways of doing this. In our view, any automated methodology should be complemented by research involving the owners of their profiles, for validation and further in-depth analysis. Reips, U.-D., & Buffardi, L. (2012). Studying migrants with the help of the Internet: Methods from psychology. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38(9), 1405-1424. doi:10.1080/1369183X.2012.698208 http://personalwebpages.deusto.es/reips/pubs/papers/2012ReipsBuffardi_JEMS.p... With kind regards, Ulf At 15:25 Uhr +0000 24.1.2013, juliano spyer wrote:

dear all - I am part of an 8 person team from UCL going out in April to study the impact of social networking sites in 7 countries over the next 15 months. (You can find more about our project here: http://ow.ly/1MZJcg ) All of us are following this list now and would like to ask a question to those conducting research on Facebook.

We need to find a way of calculating the top twenty five people who interact with a person's facebook profile. We assume we can only do this with respect to postings, rather than chat or private messaging (unless someone knows otherwise).

We are aware that Wolfram Alpha does this for comments but it would be better to include likes, sharing etc.

Any suggestions welcome.

Many thanks

juliano spyer _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

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