What I like most about this project is actually the repository of data sets. Curated graph data sets are hard to come, and the ones at SNAP have already been used in different publications, so there are fewer errors and, usually, a good baseline for comparisons available. Plus, the data sets are relatively diverse.
It is really good at performance (thanks to optimised C++ implementation) for running it on large networks compared to networkx or other pure python implementations but its usability is very bad.
Military funded (DARPA's Social Media in Strategic Communication program) to develop the research necessary for running highly automated global-scale social network propaganda campaigns.
Can someone explain why this is coming up now? From what I see, this looks like an old project (2014). I'd love to understand if there is something fresh to be aware of.
I have used SNAP because it implements a role extraction algorithm for graphs. But in my experience networkx, python-igraph and graph-tool are nicer libraries to use for manipulating graphs and performing network analysis. Networkx is perhaps the most Pythonic, but it's also the slowest.
I don't care about a bunch of Python 2 research-quality code. The amazing part of the project, to me, is all the data that they make available in one place.
It's even older than that. I remember it from back in grad school (ca. 2009) when Facebook and social networks in general were hot subjects in academia.
Readit News
https://networkx.github.io/http://igraph.org/python/https://graph-tool.skewed.de/
EDIT: except, looks like they don't support python 3 yet. That's a dealbreaker, unfortunately. All my code is in python 3.6.