http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=647297

koknat has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

PerlMonks,

I'm writing a program that uses WWW::Mechanize to traverse the LinkedIn social networking site.

Background:
LinkedIn lets you connect to people which you already know - co-workers, former co-workers, college classmates, etc. (friends). I'm connected directly to 86 friends.
Each of my friends is connected to their friends. By clicking on a friend's profile, I can see who their friends are. LinkedIn tells me that I have 2400 of these 2nd-degree connections (friends-of-friends).

I'd like to put this information into a Perl data structure. Once I've done that, it's easy to process the data:
* Are there any people which many of my friends know, which I don't?
* Does anyone from my waterski club know anyone at work?

I've used WWW::Mechanize before. I can pull in a page from LinkedIn and parse the HTML. The problem is that the page of my connections does not list my friends in HTML. It looks like it's running a plugin.
Here's the page. You need to be signed in to LinkedIn to see it: http://www.linkedin.com/connections?trk=network_yourcnx
Does anyone have an idea of how to solve this problem?

Thanks,

- Chris Koknat