Help me find the king/queen of the MySpace hill in a specific geographic region!

November 2, 2006 4:00 PM

I need to search MySpace for the people within a geographic area who have the most "friends" -- is this possible?

I'm working on a freelance article in which I'm supposed to talk to the person in Chicagoland with the most MySpace friends. I've asked MySpace for help identifying this person, but they've got a policy against revealing details about members. Is there any way I can do this on my own?

I'm not a programmer, so suggestions that I build some sort of scraper or spider won't be all that helpful -- but if you know of an existing program I could use easily, I'd love to hear about it.

posted by me3dia to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Oh, and I know I can filter a people search by zip code. The problem is I can make a general search -- sans keyword -- by zip.
posted by me3dia at 4:07 PM on November 2, 2006

Is anybody going to call you out if you don't get the person with the absolute most? Anyway, here's someone in the Chicago area with over 6000 myspace friends, that's probably up there:

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=6737966
posted by anonymous_k at 4:47 PM on November 2, 2006

6000 is nothing. I've seen people with over 100,000 easily.
posted by dgeiser13 at 6:39 PM on November 2, 2006

The question is, are you going to include myspace members who've screwed around with the number, and if not, how will you tell?
posted by justgary at 6:45 PM on November 2, 2006

dgeiser13: The poster is looking for individuals in the Chicago area.

justgary: You can tell by going to the "view all x's friends" page. The style formatting tricks used on a member's home page to change the number of friends don't work there.
posted by anonymous_k at 9:30 PM on November 2, 2006

6,000 is definitely nothing. I've got almost 5,000 and I've come across a lot of myspacers in the Dallas area with at least double that.
posted by damnjezebel at 9:46 PM on November 2, 2006

It ultimately doesn't have to be the the highest, but it does have to be pretty high. That's why I was hoping to find a way to search for the highest, so I'd have a number of people to choose from in case the sheer winner didn't agree to talk.

Thanks, anonymous_k -- it's a place to start.
posted by me3dia at 9:57 PM on November 2, 2006

Alas, on further examination, it would appear that Tripp Lee (anonymous_k's find) is in Fort Myers, FL. Back to the drawing board.
posted by me3dia at 10:11 PM on November 2, 2006

My recommendation would be to browse this Google query until you find someone in Chicago who has a lot of friends. Once you find someone e-mail them and ask them if they know anyone in Chicago with more friends then them. If they give you a name then ask the next person the same question. And so on.

You may find entities with a lot of friends but sorting out the actual real people may cause you trouble.
posted by dgeiser13 at 11:16 PM on November 2, 2006

Social networks like MySpace are small-world networks.

One of the major properties of small-world networks is that any person who has a large number of friends is most likely a hub, and therefore connected to most other people who have large numbers of friends.

Here's a simple algorithm you could follow manually. Start with the 6000 person above, find one of their friends with many friends, and make a list of the people they have in common. Pick two people from that list, on which highly friended people will predominate, and find the friends they have in common, and also appear on the friends list of the initial two people, and repeat the procedure. It shouldn't take too many iterations(6 degrees?) to get a shortlist of the major players.

This could be done efficiently using Poulsen's MySpace predator code, but even copying and pasting each friend list into a column in a spreadsheet and matching things across columns would work, without any scripting.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 7:30 AM on November 3, 2006