Social Networks with Facebook and LinkedIN

NodeXL, an add on to Excel,is a very nice tool to analyze social networks. It has a standard import utility for Twitter, Flickr and YouTube data. What to do with Facebook and LinkedIN networks? Facebook is easy: just download the social network importer and you have under import tab in NodeXL an option for dowloading Facebook data. Here is the install.

LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a bit more complicated. Go to http://socilab.com/#home and login to your LinkedIn account. Wait till the data are loaded and then your LinkedIN network will show on screen.

You can play with: change the colors for names and industries, hide names, include yourself. Then you have an explanation of the metrics, showing for example who is central in your network. And at the bottom you can download the data in CSV value or Pajek. That is easy, I thought. Import CSV in Excel and then import the workbook in NodeXL. Or take the Pajek file and import the data in NodeXL. Both failed.

Next step, download Pajek. The install is not shown in the apps of Windows 8.:-{{. Search for it and you find the .exe. Now import the LinkedIN data and make the Graph by selecting Draw from the menu.

Mail
NodeXL also analyzes your mail netwerk, that is your Outlook mail. If you use another mailserver , for example Gmail, then synchronise Outlook with Gmail by creating a Gmail account in Outlook. Select in NodeXL  import from email network and the data will be downloaded. Here are the graphs make by Node XL showing groups in different colors and one made by Pajek.