Mining the Social Web

Fetching Extended Profile Information

Although the earlier exercises in this chapter were interesting, sooner rather than later, you’ll want to begin using the LinkedIn APIs to mine the full richness of the data that’s available to you. As you’d expect, there’s a basic developer opt-in process where you register to get authorization credentials; you’ll want to visit http://developer.linkedin.com and read up on the full details, but Figure 6-5 demonstrates the broad strokes. Once you have credentials, the overall process is similar to that of any other social network that requires you to do the OAuth dance to access APIs: you request API credentials, get back a token and secret, and then use these values to ultimately get the coveted access token that can be used when sending requests. Of course, most of the gory details will be abstracted away since we’ll be using the linkedin Python module to do most of the tedious work for us. Just easy_install python-linkedin.

Figure 6-5. Basic steps involved in getting LinkedIn API credentials: from http://developer.linkedin.com, pick “Your Stuff”→“API Keys” (top), then create a new app (middle), and finally set up your app parameters and take note of your API key and secret (bottom)

Once the linkedin package is installed, the following script (Example 6-12) is a working template that you can use to get logged in and start ...