A look at the happiness of Facebook's members.
(Credit: Facebook)Facebook is even more omniscient than you thought: it can now chart the world's collective hopes and dreams and highs and lows--sort of, at least.
The company's data team on Monday launched a trippy new application called the "Gross National Happiness Index." Taking a similar format to its "Lexicon" trend-tracking product, the "GNH" currently displays a graph of data tabulated over the course of the past few years to track the "happiness" of Facebook users based on words picked up in their status messages.
The GNH is currently restricted to United States-based Facebook users--keep in mind, they now represent less than a fourth of the site's 300 million-strong memberships--who have set English as their default language. That will likely change at some undetermined date.
"Earlier this year, data scientists at Facebook started a project to measure the overall mood of people from the United States on Facebook, based on the sentiment expressed in status updates," explained a company blog post by Facebook's Adam Kramer--who is also a Ph.D. student in psychology:
Examples of positive or happy words include "happy," "yay," and "awesome," while negative, or unhappy words, include "sad," "doubt," and "tragic." We also did a brief survey of some Facebook users, which showed that people who use more positive words, relative to the number of negative words, reported higher satisfaction with their lives.
Cupcakes have been known to make people happy. Wonder if Facebook can track that.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)Holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Valentine's Day tend to generate spikes in happiness, as do days of historical significance like the election of President Barack Obama. There are notably "sad" days, too, Kramer pointed out, like the double whammy on January 22, 2008, when the Asian stock market took a dive and young actor Heath Ledger was found dead.
In January, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg chatted with blogger Robert Scoble at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and expressed interest in using the staggering amounts of data on the social network to generate a sort of "sentiment engine."
"He said that already, his teams are able to sense when nasty news, like stock prices are headed down, is under way," Scoble wrote at the time. "He also told me that the sentiment engine notices a lot of 'going out' kinds of messages on Friday afternoon and then notices a lot of 'hungover' messages on Saturday morning. He's not sure where that research will lead."
Sound creepy? Facebook doesn't think so. "To protect your privacy, no one at Facebook actually reads the status updates in the process of doing this research," according to Kramer's post. "Instead, our computers do the word counting after all personally identifiable information has been removed."
The hottest hotspots in New York...for nerds.
(Credit: Sam Lessin)Just how powerful can the data behind a location-based application be? Extremely.
Earlier this month, the second annual Internet Week New York took place, and Dropio founder and certifiable data nerd Sam Lessin crunched a bunch of numbers based on what his contacts on urban navigation and friend-finding service Foursquare were doing. Lessin was working with a group of fewer than 100 contacts, almost all of whom are involved in the tech and new-media industries (this is the scene that birthed Foursquare and its predecessor Dodgeball, after all), and yet it's a fascinating peek at just how much this kind of data can reveal. He's posted it on his personal file "drop" on Dropio.
Lessin trawled through the data to find what time people checked into coffee shops in the morning (and whether they were doing this earlier or later on a given day), how much people "lost steam" over the course of a party- and conference-filled week, and how much the most popular gatherings actually matched up to the Internet Week New York official schedule. As it turns out, the hottest parties were impromptu, unofficial gatherings at the Standard Hotel and, um, Sing Sing Karaoke.
Obviously, this isn't perfect. Foursquare updates are voluntary, which means that data can't say a thing about what people are doing when they aren't telling the app about it. The presence of an app like Foursquare, too, can also skew social activity: word about the massive impromptu party at the Standard Hotel bar, for example, spread when the Foursquare check-ins started snowballing.
But when you have enough people participating--which, as of yet, Foursquare does not--the critical mass starts to correct some of those issues. It's a fascinating sneak peek at what sort of value this data could have down the road.
What we can also look forward to: pretty infographics, Orwellian privacy concerns. Eek.
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