![]() ![]() Here’s someone else’s word cloud-notably with her children’s names ordered in size according to age: Clearly this person (who happens to be the lead developer of the Wolfram|Alpha Facebook personal analytics system that I’m showing here) is pretty upbeat. So what’s in someone’s posts? Here’s another part of the standard report, now for a different person: Why is there all that Baby Gaga on Tuesdays? I’m guessing that’s something automated. What apps does she use? Here’s data on that. Then there’s a clear gap for sleep, and during standard business hours it’s primarily links and status updates… One can see she does lots of photo posting on Sunday nights, at the end of the weekend. Wolfram|Alpha shows the weekly distribution of all these updates: There’s a peak in activity late last fall, when no doubt something was going on in this person’s life. Here are some results for someone who’s definitely a much more serious Facebook user than me: In the standard Wolfram|Alpha Facebook personal analytics report, one of the first major sections is about your general Facebook activity. Let’s talk about some of the details. I wish I could do this using my own Facebook data-but I’m just not enough of a Facebook user. So instead I’m going to use data from a few kind souls around our company who’ve agreed to let me share some of their personal analytics.Ĭlose to the top of the report-at least for younger folk-there’s an immediate example of how Wolfram|Alpha’s computational knowledge is used. If it knows from Facebook when and where you were born, it can work out things like what the weather was like (down to the hour in most places-a good memory test for parents!): Here’s today’s report for me-which would be a lot longer if I were a more diligent Facebook user: When you type “facebook report”, Wolfram|Alpha generates a pretty seriously long report-almost a small book about you, with more than a dozen major chapters, broken into more than 60 sections, with all sorts of drill-downs, alternate views, etc. Here’s the age distribution, at least for people who give that data (I do wonder about those 100+ year olds…):īut these kinds of things are just the beginning. ![]() Quite a geographic distribution! 85 countries, it says. Nobody from Antarctica, though… I have to admit that I’m not a very diligent user of Facebook (mostly because I have too many other things to do). But I’ve got lots of Facebook friends (most of whom, sadly, I don’t know in real life). And scrolling down in my Wolfram|Alpha personal analytics report, I see this: Yes, it was my birthday yesterday. And yes, as my children are fond of pointing out, I’m getting quite ancient… Here’s the beginning of the report I get today when I do this: And as soon as you’ve done that, Wolfram|Alpha will immediately get to work generating a personal analytics report from the data it can get about you through Facebook. If you’re doing this for the first time, you’ll be prompted to authenticate the Wolfram Connection app in Facebook, and then sign in to Wolfram|Alpha (yes, it’s free). It’s pretty straightforward to get your personal analytics report: all you have to do is type “ facebook report” into the standard Wolfram|Alpha website. ![]() And this is just the beginning over the months to come, particularly as we see about how people use this, we’ll be adding more and more capabilities. Wolfram|Alpha knows about all kinds of knowledge domains now it can know about you, and apply its powers of analysis to give you all sorts of personal analytics. But these days a lot of people do have a rich source of data about themselves: their Facebook histories.Īnd today I’m excited to announce that we’ve developed a first round of capabilities in Wolfram|Alpha to let anyone do personal analytics with Facebook data. Now of course most people haven’t been doing the kind of data collecting that I’ve been doing for the past couple of decades. While I think adding privacy controls is a good idea, what Facebook has done reduces the richness of the results that Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics can give for Facebook users.Īfter I wrote about doing personal analytics with data I’ve collected about myself, many people asked how they could do similar things themselves. Note added: Since this blog was written, Facebook has modified their API to make much less information available about Facebook friends. ![]()
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