I suggest this book is a good reference for you "Russell, (2011) Mining the Social Web: Analyzing Data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Other Social Media Sites".

I suggest this book is a good reference for you "Russell, (2011) Mining the Social Web: Analyzing Data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Other Social Media Sites".

really appreciated it Nung! Thanks!

It would be very hard to come up with one tool because of the complexity/facts of analysis: eg spaio-temporal-thematic, people-content-network, emotion-sentiment-intent/subjectivity,.... leading to higher level properties like diffusion, spread, influence, ... leading to business/technical objectives .... Read this to get some initial exposure:

http://wiki.knoesis.org/index.php/Twitris

Just for the network alone, you have tools like: http://nodexl.codeplex.com/

You might also want to check out Pajek:

http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/pub/networks/pajek/

I don't think it scales all that well, but it might be useful for analyzing subgraphs of the network

I suggest NetMiner :)

R has many packages that makes this easy. Twitter is one package that you want to get started with.

If you are planning to build any serious models or analytics, then you should look into the text-mining and social-network packages from R. The tm and sna packages are what you need.

Most importantly you want to finalize your "problem" first (what exactly you want to do with the social data). There are multiple types of problems that people want to solve with social data: Sentiment analysis, Influence analysis, Intent analysis, competitor analysis and so on....

You can take a look at my poc video for a take on sentiment analysis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMCG-i4OzTc

- Gopalakrishna Palem

http://gopalakrishna.palem.in

Also, you might find the RapidMiner Text analytics video tutorials helpful (whether you use RapidMiner or Not).

Do not forget to checkout: http://vancouverdata.blogspot.in/2010/11/text-analytics-with-rapidminer-loading.html

- Gopalakrishna Palem

http://gopalakrishna.palem.in

In reality I am not absolutely sure of your question, as there are different dimensions on it, which are important for a refined and useful answer.

First, there are no best SNA tools, it depends on what you want. I meen, do you want visualize (static, movement), producing statistical analysis, textual analysis etc. (the tools are different in each case).

Other thing is that there is different software for egocentric or sociocentric networks, and for Sociology (in my case) it is very important. Thus, defining your object of study, and concrete goals could be useful at this stage.

See the Spanish and English best compilation of resources for SNA (journals, materials, software). It can help:

http://www.insna.org/

http://revista-redes.rediris.es/webredes/

Software also depends if you are going to analise big quantities of data or not so bigger data sets

The other thing is when you say "but its hard for me to develop some tools to gain data from twitter and facebook, basically I just want to get the "text based data" from both". I do not understand what you mean by "gain data". Extracting data? That is a previous step to SNA, and you need other procedures. For instance, going to the API in twitter.

See our methodology here but for Deliciuos:

http://rabida.uhu.es/dspace/handle/10272/6414

Hope it can help!

You can try WordStat and QDA Miner for social network analysis. For more information, click here:http://provalisresearch.com/products/content-analysis-software/

You can download a free trial from here: http://provalisresearch.com/downloads/trial-versions/

Cytoscape for sure. It is not committed to social sciences, but plenty of algorithms and visualization tools for network manipulation.

You may also want to follow my project currently named 'Dedalus' which will release a python software package before christmas for the analysis of key-players, according to the Borgatti's theory.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1149843

https://www.researchgate.net/project/Dedalus-A-high-performance-framework-for-the-analysis-of-biological-networks

gephi the best and the very best

good luck