As we all know, Facebook lets people update their friends with status updates, and with millions of users, that’s a lot of data. Look at the aggregated data over time, and you could see some interesting trends.
The Facebook Data Team recently measured happiness in the United States based on these updates with a metric they call United States Gross National Happiness.
Measuring how well-off, happy or satisfied with life the citizens of a nation are is part of the Gross National Happiness movement. This graph represents how “happy” the nation is doing from day to day, by looking at how many positive and negative words people are using when they update their status: When people are using more positive words (or fewer negative words) in their status updates than usual, that day is happier than usual!
Browse the trends over time, and there’s nothing earth-shattering really. You’ve got dips on the Mondays and peaks on holidays. Although I’m not sure what happened January 22, 2008 to make people so sad. EDIT: It was the day Heath Ledger died [Thanks, Amanda].
Big picture though, I’m sure governments, businesses, organizations, etc would be more than pleased to have something like this when they made a new policy, launched a new product, or started a new initiative.
That’s probably why so many are fascinated with the publicly available data coming out of Twitter.
[via TechCrunch]
Interesting chart – January 22 (or 23 or 24, depending what you read) is described as the saddest day of the year. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1506852/Try-to-keep-smiling-until-the-saddest-day-of-the-year.html references some research at Cardiff University that supports this finding – fascinating that Facebook also show this.
ha, that must be it
‘Happy’ Thanksgiving. ‘Merry’ Christmas. ‘Happy’ New Year. Could this not just be a correlation of people sending out generic holiday greetings?
Maybe facebook showed the 22nd of Jan as being so negative because many people put updates along the lines of “today is the saddest day of the year” and so it shows as lots of people having the word sad in their update.
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Maybe I missed it, but is there a link to more details on their data set, methodology and assumptions?
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The graph shows Jan 22, 2008 (not 2007, as this article mentions) as the saddest day. That was the day the talented young Heath Ledger passed.
You’re right. Nice catch.
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Interesting way to measure happiness… but I’ll admit that I am not honest with people about my ACTUAL state of happiness. As far as my facebook community is concerned, my life is peachy, and I update them on a variety of things…
I simply don’t tell them how unhappy I am right now, nor do I carp about month #10 of my unemployment. I use the site to help network for employment, and too many of my professional contacts are FB pals.
If I were more honest with my FB pals about my happiness state, I would have said “HOLY CRAP, I’M ON MONTH #10 of UNEMPLOYMENT” today, as I was particularly sad about it today… instead, I reposted something inspirational about success.
So while I appreciated the inspirational quote… I was actually masking my true feelings of misery for being unemployed for so damned long.
LOL.
Saying this here makes me a smidge happier! Thanks for listening! LOL.
So, the graph is not about happiness as such as the article seems to say, but about reported happiness. This is the difference between the internal company balance sheet and the promotional flyer to subscribe the next public selling of shares.
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Jan 22, 2008 was the first leg down in the bear market/recession. The stock market was down quite a bit before bouncing back.
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