friends

About Saigonist Mutual Friends Facebook App

Submitted by tomo on August 20, 2012 - 9:22am

My friend Grover and I have a lot of mutual friends as I noticed on Facebook one day. And I know that I have a lot of friends with whom I share a large number of friends. I got curious and asked myself: "Who do I have the most shared friends with?" This question turned into a Facebook FQL query which gave me the data. Then I decided to turn it into a "product" and ended up learning stuff about Facebook's PHP and JavaScript SDKs.

The final result is this Facebook App: Saigonist Mutual Friends.

Just enable the app and you'll see a list of your top 10 friends with mutual friends. I got my answer: my friend Jodie and I share 158 friends.

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Next steps? I'd like to visualize what cliques or subnetworks exist within my Facebook network...

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About the author

Asian-American expat living in Vietnam over 3 years. I am involved in tech startups and do Drupal consulting. I choose to live in Saigon and Vietnam and I want to see the city and its people reach their true potential.

Where is Saigon?

It's not wrong to wonder where in the world Saigon is.

Saigon is the name of the city now officially known as Ho Chi Minh City. But most people who call Saigon home call their home Saigon and it's mostly tourists who I hear refer to it as Ho Chi Minh City (or Ho Chi Minh Ville for the French).

After the Vietnam/American War ended in 1975, many place names ceased to exist such as Saigon, South Vietnam, and plenty of street names.

Tu Do is now Dong Khoi, Thong Nhat is Le Duan. And Tan Son Nhut Airport is now Tan Son Nhat International Airport. Rue Paul Blanchy has been Hai Ba Trung since the 1950s.

Those who haven't seen Vietnam for decades will be confused not just by the geographical changes but the incredible amount of development and modernization that has since taken place.

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I also post a lot of technical material unrelated to Vietnam that doesn't hit the home page. Starting from November 2015 I am only posting technical articles on my new sub-blog: TECH.saigonist.com

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