Foursquare is an important social media source. The concept of check-in that Foursquare introduced was quite revolutionary at the time of launching. Now we find the check-in feature in Facebook also. This chapter helped us in understanding the basic flow of data extraction in absence of a neatly developed R package. We learned how to get creative with our data extraction process. We built up on the key concepts of sentiment and graph analytics introduced in previous chapters. A conscious effort was made to not repeat the obvious processes again but to build on those processes for building something relevant. The most important takeaway from this chapter is to learn how to form a problem definition. We introduced it with an example (recommendation engine) and the users are encouraged to find different such problems in the data that we extracted (hint: classification system). This chapter also prepared us for the upcoming challenges. The next social media sources are going to be challenging as we transition from the R packages to the low level APIs.

The next set of chapters will go into the diverse area of social data and help the users with their analytics work flows.