27 Apr Visual displays of Facebook metadata

More than a million people have used Stephen Wolfram’s Personal Analytics for Facebook, a web app that generates a fascinating visual report of your Facebook profile: age, gender, relationship status, and location of your FB friends; the number of your friends’ friends and the number of their friends in common with you; your friends’ most common first and last names; your most ‘liked’ post; your FB use by day of the week and time of day; and a word cloud of your posts (like mine, at right).

Wolfram, best known as inventor of the computer program Mathematica and the search engine Wolfram Alpha, recently invited users of his FB Analytics app to participate in a “Data Donor” program, by contributing detailed data about their FB use for Wolfram’s research purposes. 

This week he released a detailed analysis of this data, as usual complete with arresting data visualizations. The whole piece is worth reading, but here’s just a taste:

How many friends do people have on Facebook have, and how does this vary with age?

What do men and women talk about on Facebook: