Analyze Google+ Posts with R [Update]

Analyze google+ posts with R

Hey everybody,

today I show you how you can start working with the Google+ API to analyze Google+ posts with R. We create a personal API key, get our own stats and plot them in a nice looking graph.

Get the API Key

You can get our API key on the Google Developer console here: https://code.google.com/apis/console

There you can see an overview of you API activities if you have some. To create a new API connection click on “APIs” and turn on the Google+ API.

Google API Console API

Google API console API menu

After you did this, you can click on “Google+” and you see a list of the available API calls. Now click on “Credentials” on the left and click on “Create new key” to create a new public API access. Then click on “Browser key” and then “Create”.

Google API calls

Google API credentials

Google API accessGoogle API key

And there it is: you API key.

Analyze Google+ Posts with R

For our first analysis we need the packages

 

 

And we need our api key and our user id:

 

 

In this case I used my own Google+ ID but you can use every ID you want. But we can just receive the public posts.

We get our raw data and put it in a JSON object with:

 

 

We can now put the data in a DataFrame to make it more readable. But we don´t need all the values we received as these are a lot. We get the fields

df

 

We can save this DataFrame as a CSV file with:

 

Visualize your Posts

To visualize your posts we extract the informations we need and store them in the Data Frame df_graph

Then we can plot it with

 

Bildschirmfoto 2013-12-28 um 19.43.45

You can find the complete code on my github page here.

Please follow me on Twitter to stay up to date.

Julian Hillebrand

During my time at university and learning about the basics of economics I started heavily exploring the possibilities and changes caused by digital disruptions and the process of digital transformation, whereby I focused on the importance of data and data analytics and combination with marketing and management.
My personal focus of interest lies heavily on technology, digital marketing and data analytics. I made early acquaintance with programming and digital technology and never stop being interested in following the newest innovations.

I am an open, communicative and curious person. I enjoy writing, blogging and speaking about technology.