There’s a lot of criticism towards Facebook for not really allowing an easy way to export your personal data. However, netvizz Facebook app by Bernhard Rieder (professor at University of Amsterdam) provides a tool that can do just that and even much more.

The way netvizz functions is very simple. First, you need to authorize the app to have access to your Facebook friendship connections. The next step is to open the app page and choose whether you want to export your own personal network or any of the groups that you belong to. If you have more than 1000 friends the process may take a long time (several minutes), but it’s worth it, because at the end you get a GDF file (which is a variation of CSV format) where all your Facebook friendships, relationships and even some meta-data are encoded. You can then open this file using a network visualization package (for example, Gephi) and get a neat visual representation of your Facebook network, communities that it’s comprised of, and the most influential members.

 
For a detailed step-by-step instruction of how to export your Facebook network using netvizz and visualize it as a graph, see our case study where we used netvizz to export and visualize Russian protest movement Facebook groups.