To have a better understanding of unfamiliar market as a BD Newbie, you may want to talk to experts in your professional network. If you just blindly ask your friends whom in their network you should reach out to, the result is usually not very fruitful, unless you have a short list. Linkedin certainly does not make it any easier, by limiting 10 connections to be shown at a time. LinkedIn does not provide an API to allow you to list the 2nd degree connections of your network. Fortunately, there is way to work around it. Ian Alexander comes across a method to use Chrome’s Developer Tools to uncover the “unoffical” browser/web API.
If you enable Developer Tools Network tab, browse to your friend profile, and click on the connections, you will see a lot of requests being fired as the page is loaded. If you scroll to the bottom near your “Connections” section and click the “Next” button, you will see an interesting request fired:
https://www.linkedin.com/profile/profile-v2-connections?id={linkedin id}&offset=10&count=10&distance=0&type=INITIAL&_=1380053112371
/profile-v2-connections returns JSON data for your connections. It accepts both offset and count arguments. Note that,
change count to a number bigger than 10 will not have any effect, it will always return no more than 10 connections at a time. In other words, you have to change offset and repeat many times to retrieve all of the connections.
You can verfify if it works or not by right click on /profile-v2-connections, and click on “Open Link in New Tab” should return a JSON data in the new tab.
A dirty python script is written to make this process a bit easier. To use the script,
you need to make sure you have curl binary, as well as pandas and openpxyl packages installed.
pip install pandas openpxyl
Right click on /profile-v2-connections, click on “Copy as cURL”, open up a terminal and paste it after typeing python scrap_linkedin.py, and hit enter. Below is an example of the actual command line.
python scrap_linkedin.py curl 'https://www.linkedin.com/profile/profile-v2-connections?id=54617196&offset=0&count=10&distance=1&type=INITIAL&_=1434208146724' -H 'Cookie: bcookie="v=2&6789ccca-a705-4829-8306-6555c44011e5"; visit="v=1&M"; __qca=P0-341338068-1407868716823; VID=V_2014_10_31_02_1849; oz_props_fetch_size_14271099=15; bscookie="v=1&2015041013450300a40cce-bbbd-439e-8e62-b4b14a70da66AQGJAsMCqxO6TBwFHYFLdgOdHFRRhSuH"; L1l=1cff04a0; L1e=1ba80ac9; sessionid="eyJkamFuZ29fdGltZXpvbmUiOiJBbWVyaWNhL05ld19Zb3JrIn0:1Z09p1:3awkgMalmVHp0vD2Ov3VNv2nJy8"; _ga=GA1.2.1733979208.1432610629; L1c=14967427; lihc_auth_en=1434023164; lihc_auth_str=CkDwaEB41EB1IwId57eR7S%2Fyg1N%2BSvUL%2FXz%2F8eHDRMQSGixg4OGGXnGTnsRV0cxxNjw4V%2B7C5i6SlbGJ3N%2FqqZpiOUz2zgOQkK%2FaAtEqVcts1W84fQxUhJRsRdgpajl3whP8S9FsQT04ESoF0BNx23MTY686o4uPRr9BXH6s5b5sN7AqAt%2FaW%2BrKX%2BbfvBowVBNNpgJ%2Ffql2yFu31SKZObLVisKDtIveNDMkNTAyThixjBzxq00VxKwRWUnd8anuWl21GKVRm8Omo7m0OPvQa4Au7DZg6FMHaubc5RLApkuxMhCrku0f8OBvRN8tt0%2FLKa2B5dw2PYBClvdjii0ZoU3LE6G8dqlKrUXKLCScfEDq90GuBzqdog%3D%3D; sdsc=1%3A1SZM1shxDNbLt36wZwCgPgvN58iw%3D; share_setting=PUBLIC; csrftoken=ELrFZckA0IYhcWhc0DTkuYrECNUuL7Df; __utma=23068709.1733979208.1432610629.1434109323.1434170887.4; __utmc=23068709; __utmz=23068709.1433976462.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none); __utmv=23068709.user; _leo_profile=""; li_at=AQECAQDZwnsDeRYwAAABTezDPOYAAAFN7bgC2066yhW6CIYN_lrgaEPTdhEuT9drA_m8BrhexExP9uIdrUAJsPIDdcLvr-1Fsb3ADSzRexUkS0G3CvfXnZpQ6Y7rYegXAkPhSEIMfN16LQOTnBur2VQ; sl="v=1&DQ3z8"; JSESSIONID="ajax:2060657418974993997"; PLAY_SESSION="cc5f3a897af2a30f7700af681d01efda5731a309-chsInfo=5b877214-7cf7-498a-8bd2-eb0b7d5dcb65+nav_account_sub_nav_upgrade"; RT=s=1434208146416&r=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Fprofile%2Fview%3Fid%3D13481474%26authType%3Dname%26authToken%3DcaBb%26trk%3Dprof-sb-browse_map-name; _lipt=0_2uw3Ir0voPvaeizPAkZsFLC1-YbKbTOElA77Zp4WwRU4408WI4yw6hJDL7tsw3tHVIovzh3Kjnmz-0JlOsHVOtZMikcnVqisVQkgceLH3JAyWlA9o4ULhFK2MvXoHwsD-94PGr7KuocxaMS6ZE5NCx1mtoPgrer8PUiCHUJ5YNeGfC4YUVC74Rcef-L7jlQb1XSpRJzvaynFK8VLWa8c1znJYxDlW5b0B6v-pqLfL6GxvpopYawNdh3mJsVoI5YmArCu5ynoM3q9nbyDGh52YBCR30bRvTYwU3IHBysHMe-maa0rMQsxDGRbkG8wspKNxa2XKJzE_inyHY0nv2m-Mk7HDhJnYJSBGdA0zzemYsn; lidc="b=TB99:g=75:u=34:i=1434208150:t=1434243098:s=AQEF_wVCK9WSoXYoXvkbWbzdd6z7byPZ"; lang="v=2&lang=en-us&c="' -H 'DNT: 1' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.90 Safari/537.36' -H 'Accept: text/plain, */*; q=0.01' -H 'Referer: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=54617196&authType=name&authToken=XsEh&trk=prof-sb-how_conn-name-link' -H 'X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' --compressed
You can change the vaule of id to any given user and fire it away. An excel spreadsheet will be generated at the working directory.