Interesting. Sadly it does not mentions any practical tools for doing social network analysis:<p>Here are few that I know:<p>For small networks (up to a million or two million nodes such as Wikipedia Link graph from 2009)<p>Following libraries provide code to handle and manipulate Network datasets:<p>1: SNAP by Prof. Jure Leskovec [ <a href="http://snap.stanford.edu" rel="nofollow">http://snap.stanford.edu</a> ] written in C++<p>2: Networkx by Lanl [ <a href="http://networkx.lanl.gov/" rel="nofollow">http://networkx.lanl.gov/</a> ] written in Python, esp. good for fast prototyping<p>There are few Databases for storing networks, e.g. Neo4J <a href="http://neo4j.org/" rel="nofollow">http://neo4j.org/</a> .<p>Additionally there is a Graph Processing Language called as Gremlin<p><a href="http://wiki.github.com/tinkerpop/gremlin/" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.github.com/tinkerpop/gremlin/</a> .<p>For Large networks with millions and billions of nodes, one can use Hadoop / Map-Reduce or Apache Hama [still in nascent stage]. Google has a special system known as Pregel which it uses to perform scalable computations over large networks.
So this was back in 2008, but I read this from Bruce Schneider:<p><a href="http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/10/data_mining_for_1.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/10/data_mining_fo...</a><p><quote>But the authors conclude the type of data mining that government bureaucrats would like to do--perhaps inspired by watching too many episodes of the Fox series 24--can't work. "If it were possible to automatically find the digital tracks of terrorists and automatically monitor only the communications of terrorists, public policy choices in this domain would be much simpler. But it is not possible to do so."</quote><p>So did something change in the last two years? I mean Palantir is making a crap ton for presumably something similar.<p>Was this ever a problem, or was it overcome?
Reading a social network analysis textbook, one is struck that all the examples involve rigorous data collection by social scientists with clipboards. Hundreds and thousands of hours of work for a small graph. Modern social networks have given us an abundance of data against which to leverage a backlog of techniques that were previously constrained by manual data collection.<p>Phone companies use this stuff in ways that may be unethical, but it can just as easily be used in ways to empower you to leverage your own network. There are exciting potentials we are just beginning to see.
So, phone companies spy on us to make money, help the police (probably without a warrant), and spread propaganda.<p><sarcasm> How surprising. </sarcasm><p>Seriously, it's not like we couldn't have foreseen: <a href="http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2010/feb/01/freedom-cloud-software-freedom-privacy-and-securit/" rel="nofollow">http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2010/feb/01/freedom-clou...</a>