Feeding off the momentum from Stephen Wolfram’s personal analytics earlier this year, Wolfram|Alpha launched Facebook Analytics, which spits out graphs about your profile and your friends. You can see your activity over time, weekly distributions, and some general information about how people like and comment your status updates.
I’ve only updated my Facebook status a few times this year, so the profile-focused information is interesting to me, but the second half of the report provides high-level aggregates about your friends. For example, I’m apparently at a stage in life where most of my friends are either married or in a relationship. You can also see how your friends are connected via a network graph.
So you get more detail than you do out of current infographic-generators. The hook though is the links within the report that lead to information about your birthday or where you were born, kind of like when you end up reading about sasquatch on Wikipedia when your original search was actually work-related.
So how much data is Wolfram getting out of this deal?
If you agree to install the app and run the report, Wolfram accesses your posts and any personal information you’ve listed on Facebook.
They take all the data they can get but per the page on Facebook analytics.
“Your information is only stored for one hour, so each time you return, we’ll run fresh analytics on your Facebook data.”
Never would have thought that a majority were married. But overwhelmingly so.